THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 



BOOKS BEARING ON 
"THE CARLYLE CONTROVERSY" 



New Letters ©t Memorials of 
Jane Welsh Carlyle 

( A COLLECTION OF HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED LETTERS ) 

Annotated by Thomas Carlyle, and edited by Alexander Carlyle, 
with an introduction by Sir James Crichton- Browne, F. R, S, 

Numerous illustrations drawn in lithography by T. R. Way, and 
photogravures and portraits from hitherto unreproduced originals. 

In two volumes. 8vo. Boxed, |56.oo net. 

New Letters of Thomas Carlyle 

Edited and annotated by Alexander Carlyle, with Notes and Intro- 
duction and numerous illustrations. 

In two volumes. 8vo. Boxed, ^6.00 net. 



"J 1 i ! 



V.'^ 






f 



> ii J 



s 



J 



>T "^ ^' ^ - 





THE 

NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

A REJOINDER 

TO 

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE'S 
« MY RELATIONS WITH CARLYLE " 



BY 

ALEXANDER CARLYLE, B.A. 

AND 

SIR JAMES CRICHTON-BROWNE, M.D, 



JOHN LANE : THE BODLEY HEAD 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

MDCCCCIII 



,^^v 



Copyright, 1903, by John Lank 



y 



"the tiaflAHY o?l 

CONGRESS, 
Two Cowos RpotiveD 

i^UV 'ilk \mi% 

p.f^mtrwir rwmv 
ni,Ass a. xXo. No 

^ ? 3 ^ 8 



First Edition, October, 1903 



Set up by The Publishers' Printing Co. 

New York, U. S. A. 

Printed by The Caxton Press 

New York, U.S.A. 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 



PREFACE 

IN the Prefatory note to "My Relations with 
Carlyle," by James Anthony Froude, it is stated 
by the Editors, Mr. Ashley A. Froude and Miss 
Margaret Froude, that it would never have been given 
to the world had not the production of the " New 
Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle," with 
the serious charges contained in the Introduction 
and Foot-notes, appeared to demand its publication. 
But the serious charges referred to, although no 
doubt rendered more serious by the fresh evidence 
in their support brought to light in the " New Letters 
and Memorials" — evidence which Mr. Froude had 
suppressed — were not in any case new charges, but 
the mere repetition of charges which were first made 
twenty years ago, and which are not really traversed 
by " My Relations with Carlyle." Mr. Froude at- 
tempts to explain his superabundant verbal inac- 
curacies, but has not a word to say in answer to the 
grave charges brought against him, of giving garbled 
extracts of documents and omitting of set purpose 
such portions of them as did not fit in with his own 
views, of contravening again and again the solemn 
injunctions imposed on him by Carlyle, of making 
claims to advantages to which he was not entitled, 
of refusing to implement an unconditional promise, 
and generally of producing a Biography elaborated 

7 



PREFACE 



with the art of the practised romancer in which the 
true features of the subject can scarcely be recog- 
nised, but in which assertion and inference, unsup- 
ported by evidence, are palmed off for correct state- 
ment. On all these points he has allowed judgment 
to go by default. His defence consists in the accen- 
tuation of what he had already said derogatory of 
Carlyle, with the addition of fresh charges against 
him of a very odious description, which, had they 
been true, should in decency have been kept con- 
cealed, but which, being groundless, as we hope to 
prove, reflect discredit on those who have rashly, or 
in the spirit of retaliation, thrust them prominently 
forward. That Mr. Froude ever decided to keep 
silence on these charges we take leave to doubt. 

As early as 1881 Mr. Froude, in a letter which 
appeared in the Times of May 6th, alluded to reasons 
which he could not give "without entering on a 
subject on which it is better to be silent," and added 
that he would be sorry if the difficulty of his task 
was " increased by a demand for further explanations 
which I shall be very reluctant to give." He was 
at once challenged by Mrs. Alexander Carlyle in the 
Times^ to satisfy the curiosity he had awakened by 
his reference to " hidden reasons and explanations." 
To this challenge he made no reply; but on the 
20th of April, 1886, when he heard that Professor 
Charles Eliot Norton was about to publish the 
" Early Letters of Carlyle," he wrote to Mrs. Alexan- 
der Carlyle, drawing attention to the passage in Mrs. 
Carlyle's Journal relating to " two blue marks on the 

wrist," and hinting that this secret might have to 

8 



4J ,0 ci;%^ »<^ u'v (^ Uvfe uittt U1Sw^uv«J 

V-'t4 M itr^fui^> «f WicCt;*. i'^cjv*:-! : ^ v^^j (j^h. 

^^ Cj CjUi <*^ ^ ttftI'<Uv 0wj>^t\t .%^4/1 
Jam ftu- |KViiK£i el ^ ^ W- ^W - Qjfi ^*^ai^t ft* 

FACSIMILE OF CARLYLe's HANDWRITING IN I 832, AT THE AGE OF 37. 

See "Reminiscences," Norton's Edition, i., p. 5; Froude's Edition, i., p. 8. 
See also Frontispiece. 



PREFACE 

be revealed. Again, In 1896, there was a threat to 
publish " My Relations with Carlyle," merely because 
Mr. Alexander Carlyle had requested that a private 
letter by Mr. Froude to Mr. McPherson, which was 
published in his short Life of Carlyle, should not be 
allowed to appear in a second edition, lest it should 
involve a renewal of the old controversy about the 
papers. On this occasion Mr. Leman, Mr. Ashley 
Froude's solicitor, wrote as follows: "Mr. Froude's 
representatives have no desire to re-open any contro- 
versial questions in relation to Mr. Thomas Carlyle, 
but I know that there is in existence a Memorandum 
by the late Mr. Froude written in anticipation of any 
further controversy on the lines of the former one 
(the main point in which is however known to me 
and I believe to a few other people), which, if pub- 
lished, would throw perhaps an unexpected light 
upon the whole business, and materially justify what 
he has written and printed." 

It is clear that this Memorandum, which was found 
in a despatch-box after Mr. Froude's death, but 
which, it is said, he had shown to no one, has not 
been kept altogether private by his representatives, 
but had been held in readiness for a convenient 
moment for that publication which Mr. Froude, not- 
withstanding his alleged decision to remain silent, 
had obviously all along contemplated and intended. 
Towards the end of the Memorandum he writes, " If 
I have now told all it is because I see that nothing 
short of it will secure me the fair judgment to which 
I am entitled. . . . The whole facts are now made 
known. ... I have nothing more to reveal." 

9 



PREFACE 

It is to be regretted that "My Relations with 
Carlyle " was not published at an earlier period, for 
many persons, who could have refuted statements 
contained in it, have passed away; still, even now, 
Carlyle's friends rejoice that it is brought forth, so 
that they are enabled to grapple with allegations 
against him, for which Mr. Froude has made himself 
responsible, but which so long as they remained 
impalpable rumours it was impossible for them to 
deal with. The rumours reflecting on Carlyle, which 
can be now traced to their source, at first mere 
gaseous gossip, have become gradually congealed 
and glued to his name with many offensive accre- 
tions, and there are certainly multitudes of persons 
amongst us who believe that he was, as represented 
in Mr. Froude's posthumous Fragment, a man of 
transcendant ability, but selfish, overbearing, cruel, 
and contemptible. To show, as we hope to be able 
to do, even at this late hour, that Mr. Froude was 
wrong — that he believed a myth, betrayed his trust, 
and must himself take the place of the man he has 
so unmercifully pilloried, will supply as striking an 
example as modern literary history affords of what 
the Greeks called " Nemesis " and Carlyle the " Jus- 
tice of God." 



10 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 



MR. FROUDE'S account of his relations with 
Carlyle, found written in pencil in a note- 
book after his death, was prepared while he 
was in Cuba in 1887, and he had not therefore, while 
writing it, access to the correspondence and docu- 
ments bearing on the matters with which he dealt. 
One would have thought that in composing a vindica- 
tion of himself in connexion with his discharge of a 
trust which he was accused of having betrayed — a vin- 
dication which he bequeathed to his children that they 
might have something to rely on should his honour or 
good faith be assailed — he would have desired to con- 
sult authorities and to verify every statement he made ; 
but that was not Froude's way of going to work. In 
its obituary notice of him the Times said : " He was 
not a student, in the real sense of the term ; he had 
neither the desire to probe his authorities to the 
bottom nor the patience to do so. . . . It is said that 
at the time when Froude was busy on the part of his 
history where Burleigh plays a leading part he was 
invited to stay at Hatfield and make an examination 
of the masses of Cecil papers there preserved — at a 
time, it must be remembered, before the Historical 
Manuscripts Commission had published any of them 
— and that Froude went, and stayed one day. . . . 

II 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 



Scholars who read his brilliant sketch of Caesar can 
see plainly that he had never properly read Cicero's 
letters, or not many of them. When he visited the 
West Indies, with a view to writing his 'English in 
the West Indies,' he preferred to sit in the shade 
reading Dante rather than to see for himself the 
institutions of Jamaica, about which, he told his host, 
he knew enough already. And, most noteworthy of 
all, though he visited Simancas and stayed some time 
there, it is unquestionable that he learned compara- 
tively little about the records there preserved." True 
to his usual method, in writing " My Relations with 
Carlyle," Froude disdained the assistance of records 
or witnesses, but trusting entirely to his memory and 
imagination, in the intervals of his study of Dante 
and while absorbing the history and institutions of 
Cuba at the pores, produced an Apology which is 
itself in need of an apologetic. There is scarcely 
one line of Froude's pamphlet that does not require 
correction or qualification, and the general impres- 
sion it creates is as wide of the truth as it is possible 
to be. A paragon of errors, Froude has never shown 
himself more inaccurate. Never has his treacherous 
memory more signally beguiled him or more indubi- 
tably proved itself to have been an organ, not for 
retention and reproduction, but for transformation. 
It did not, like other men's memories, yield up what 
it had appropriated, but a special secretion of its 
own. In Carlyle's case it was supplied with heart's 
blood and has given out bile. The honoured master, 
the old familiar friend has been converted into a 
grotesque monster compounded of strength and 

12 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

weakness, dignity and deformity. The pamphlet is 
made up of the writhings of wounded egotism and 
of virulent attacks on the character and conduct of 
the man whom he had extolled as a great spiritual 
teacher. Having first assassinated the reputation of 
Carlyle, Froude now mutilates the remains. What- 
ever merits his Life of Carlyle possessed — and no 
one denies it some merits — are now destroyed by 
this posthumous pamphlet. Having drawn a portrait 
of Carlyle possessing at least some more or less 
distant resemblance, he has deliberately thrown a 
pailful of liquid lampblack over it and rendered it 
irrecognisable as the portrait of anything human. 

It is to be regretted that Froude 's paper, "My 
Relations with Carlyle," has not been published 
exactly as it was found in the despatch-box after his 
death. The first few pages have been withheld, 
because they are "of too intimate a nature to be 
given to the public " ; but that may be truly said of 
the whole essay, and it is clear that Froude himself 
had drawn no distinction of this kind, but had antici- 
pated that all of what he had written would be pub- 
lished. It may be assumed that the omitted pages 
would not in any way have strengthened his case 
against Carlyle, but they might have supplied the 
means of testing the fidelity of his narrative in mat- 
ters of great personal moment, in respect of which, 
even a recreant memory rarely goes astray. The 
epitome of some of the omitted matter given as an 
introduction to the essay undoubtedly suggests that, 
in the interests of veracity, omission was advisable. 
It is the object of this epitome to show that Froude 

13 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

could have no earthly motive to misrepresent Carlyle, 
to whom the crisis of his life was due and in submis- 
sion to whose teachings he had made great personal 
sacrifices. But the facts quoted in support of this 
contention will not bear critical examination. " He 
(Froude) had taken deacon's orders, and looked to 
the Church as his regular profession. So much as a 
doubt," he tells us, "had so far never crossed his 
mind, of the truth of the creed in which he had been 
brought up." " It was at this time," he says, " that 
Carlyle's books came in my way. They produced on 
me what Evangelicals call *a conviction of sin.' . . . 
They taught me that the religion in which I had 
been reared was but one of many dresses in which 
spiritual truth had arrayed itself, and that the creed 
was not literally true so far as it was a narrative of 
facts." It seems a pity to have to overthrow such 
a moving little bit of autobiography, but the tyr- 
anny of dates makes it untenable. It was in 1841, 
at Falmouth, that Carlyle's books first came in 
Froude's way, when they were brought to his notice 
by John Sterling, and at once arrested his attention, 
and it was not until 1844 that he took deacon's 
orders. He has himself told us in " The Nemesis of 
Faith," that it was the " French Revolution," which 
he read in 1841, that first stirred his conscience, so 
the alternatives are these : either he is wrong in say- 
ing that it was Carlyle's books that undermined and 
overthrew his faith, or he took deacon's orders after 
his faith was disintegrated, and went on assuming 
faith when he had it not, for he preached a funeral 
sermon in St. Mary's Church, Torquay, in 1847. 

14 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

For the purposes of " My Relations with Carlyle " 
Froude has clearly exaggerated Carlyle 's early influ- 
ence over him. He would have us believe that it 
was this influence which led him to give up his 
fellowship and abandon his orders, and which changed 
the whole current of his life, but it would not be diffi- 
cult to show that many other influences contributed to 
shape his career. When he tells us now, that it was 
Carlyle's writings which first made him " realise the 
meaning of duty and the overpowering obligation to 
do it," we must remember that he wrote to Hallam, 
Lord Tennyson, " I owe to your father the first 
serious reflexions upon life and the nature of it." 
When he tells us now, that it was Carlyle's writings 
that deprived him of belief in the facts of his creed, 
we must remember that he has previously stated that 
it was his studies for the Life of St. Neot, which 
Newman had invited him to write, that put the 
breaking strain on his credulity. Goethe, Lessing, 
Neander, Schleiermacher, the Tractarians and the 
Evangelicals had all a hand in the making of Froude, 
whose views underwent a gradual development. Not 
till long after he had definitely left the Ark of the 
Covenant, could he find a twig on which to settle. 
Carlyle's doctrine ultimately obtained the ascendency 
in his mind, but his personal influence was not 
brought to bear on him until 1849, when he was 
introduced by Spedding, not perhaps until i860 when 
he settled in London and was admitted on friendly 
terms to the circle at Cheyne Row. 

In the first instance Froude, according to his own 
account, was repelled by Carlyle's objurgations and 

15 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

demeanour. " He denounced everybody and every- 
thing ! " and although Froude was of opinion, being 
then apparently in a damnatory mood, that this 
wholesale denunciation "was intensely true and 
right," he felt " that it would be impossible to live 
with him on equal terms." Carlyle, on the other 
hand, must have been powerfully attracted to Froude, 
for, contrary to what was ever known of him in any 
other case, he forced his acquaintance upon him : so 
Froude tells us. He called on him, wished to see 
more of him and invited him to be his companion in 
his walks and rides ; and as it would have been ungra- 
cious to reject such advances, Froude grasped the 
proffered hand and was placed on a friendly footing 
in Carlyle's home, where he seems to have begun at 
once to make those unfavourable observations which 
have dimmed and defaced his Biography of his host, 
and which are marshalled with relentless candour in 
his posthumous pamphlet. 

That Froude himself frequently begged to be 
admitted to the Cheyne Row household is certain. 
Mrs. Carlyle has placed a photograph of him in her 
album, and pasted underneath it a characteristic cut- 
ting from a letter in Froude's handwriting which 
reads, " May I come to tea on Friday? " Introduced 
into closer relations with the life at Cheyne Row he 
could not help becoming acquainted, he tells us, with 
many things which he would rather not have known, 
but which he has carefully treasured up against the 
day of wrath. 

First of all it was borne in upon Froude that 

Carlyle had an ungovernable temper which caused 

i6 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

much domestic unhappiness. " Rumour said, that 
she [Mrs. Carlyle] and Carlyle quarrelled often, and I 
could easily believe it," he added, " from occasional 
expressions about him which fell from her." Farther 
on he states explicitly that they quarrelled fiercely 
and violently, and by various allusions throughout 
his paper he seeks to convey the idea that they lived 
a cat-and-dog life, owing mainly to Carlyle's frac- 
tious, impatient and selfish disposition. "In Car- 
lyle's catalogue of his own duties self-restraint seemed 
to be forgotten." But Froude and rumour cannot 
on this question stand against the phalanx of wit- 
nesses on the other side. Almost without exception, 
the other intimates of the household at Cheyne 
Row, who had as good opportunities of judging as 
Froude and perhaps more discernment than he, take 
a directly opposite view and testify to the generally 
amiable terms on which Carlyle and his wife jogged 
along together. Moncure Conway observed that 
"when Carlyle's mood was stormiest, her voice could 
in an instant allay it: the lion was led as by a little 
child." "In the conversation which went on in the 
old drawing-room at Chelsea, there was no sugges- 
tion of things secret or reserved ; people with sensi- 
tive toes had no careful provision made for them, 
and had best keep away; free, frank and simple 
speech and intercourse were the unwritten but ever- 
present law. Mrs. Carlyle's wit and humour were 
overflowing, and she told anecdotes about her hus- 
band under which he sat with a patient look of re- 
pudiation, until the loud laugh broke out and led 

the chorus." Emerson wrote in his Diary, " Carlyle 
2 17 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

and his wife live on beautiful terms. Their ways are 
very engaging and in her book-case all his books are 
inscribed to her as they come from year to year, each 
with some significant lines." Professor Masson 
placed on record that, " One of the pleasantest sights 
in the Cheyne Row household, on a winter evening, 
was Carlyle himself, seated in a chair by the fire, or 
reclining on the hearth-rug, pipe in mouth, listening 
benignantly and admiringly to those caricatures of 
his ways, and illustrations of his recent misbehaviours, 
from his beloved Jane's lips. Insufificient apprecia- 
tion of the amount of consciously humorous, and 
mutually admiring give-and-take of this kind in the 
married life of the extraordinary pair, both of them 
so sensitively organised, has had much to do, it 
seems to me, with that elaborately studied contrast 
of them which Mr. Froude has succeeded in impress- 
ing on the public." " The notion of Carlyle," says 
Masson, referring to Froude's portrait of him, " as in 
any sense a misanthrope, a hard-hearted man, a mere 
raging or railing egotist, is one of those absurdities, 
those perversions of the actual truth into its very 
opposite, which arise not from mere insufficiency of 
knowledge, but from a moral incapacity of under- 
standing anything unusually complex in character, 
and a malevolent predetermination to resist evi- 
dence." And yet, once at any rate, Froude himself 
seems to have had some inkling of the truth which 
Masson insists on, for in one place in the " Life of Car- 
lyle " he speaks of Mrs. Carlyle " telling stories at her 
husband's expense, at which he laughed himself as 
heartily as we did " — a behaviour on her part some- 

i8 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

what difficult to reconcile with her condition as 
depicted in " My Relations with Carlyle," as a poor, 
dejected, down-trodden woman, whose " pale, drawn, 
suffering face" haunted Froude in his dreams. It 
was "exquisitely painful," he says, to see this be- 
witching woman suffering through her husband's 
neglect and violence. 

Amongst others who have borne generous testi- 
mony to the cordial and affectionate terms on which 
the Carlyles lived may be named Tennyson, G. S. 
Venables, Mrs. Oliphant, John Tyndall, Sir Charles 
Gavan Duffy and A.J.Symington; but their testi- 
mony, strong and weighty as it is, and that of a host 
of other responsible witnesses who might be sum- 
moned, cannot elucidate the true conjugal relations 
of Carlyle and his wife half as clearly and convinc- 
ingly as the letters which they wrote to each other, 
during the forty years of their wedded life. Enough 
of these have been already published to put it beyond 
a shadow of a doubt that, from their first acquaintance 
to the end of their days, they were united by almost 
unbroken trust and love which only deepened as the 
end drew near. Conscious that these letters, if 
referred to, must reveal the hollow mockery of the 
grim Cheyne Row tragedy he had set himself to 
compose, Froude attempts to discredit them, by 
quoting Mrs. Carlyle as saying that her husband's 
letters were written for his biographer. Where did 
she say so ? Not in her replies to these letters, which 
are full of grateful acknowledgment and sympathetic 
response. The remark, it is to be suggested, must 
have been made in one of Froude's imaginary con- 

19 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

versations with her, or if it did actually fall from 
her lips, it must have been ironical, for the letters, 
as she well knew, came from the fulness of the 
writer's heart, and were meant for no eye but hers. 
We have Froude's authority for it, that until long 
after his wife's death Carlyle was resolved that no 
express biography of him should be written ; and here 
we have the man who tells us that the task of biogra- 
phy was ultimately confided to him, insinuating that 
Carlyle in his familiar correspondence with his wife, 
while denouncing " the brute of a world," was posing 
for future generations. But Mrs. Carlyle's letters, 
the sincerity and spontaneity of which Froude would 
be the last to impugn, even more strikingly than her 
husband's, bring out that their matrimonial pathway, 
if not all strewn with flowers and free from rough 
places, was on the whole felicitous, and that they 
never parted hands while journeying along it. They 
had their little differences and misunderstandings 
and sometimes sharp encounters. What married 
pair has not ? What man of genius and his wife ever 
escaped them? Who has proposed a competition 
for the Dunmow Flitch after forty years of wedlock ? 
Mrs. Carlyle was prone to take offence and could 
speak daggers. Carlyle, as he said of his wife's 
grandfather, had a hot, impatient temper, break- 
ing out into fierce flashes as of lightning, if you 
touched him the wrong way, but they were flashes 
only, never bolts. But on the whole they were happy 
and contented with each other, and it is impossible 
now to determine which was more to blame for any 
disagreements that varied the monotony of their 

20 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

existence. Carlyle has chivalrously taken most of 
the blame for these on himself, but hear what Jane 
says referring to one little quarrel that occurred on 
one occasion between them. " Nothing less than 
a devil (I am sure) could have tempted me to tor- 
ment you and myself as I did that unblessed day. 
Woe to me, then, if I had had any other than 
the most constant and generous of mortal men to 
deal with. Blessings on your equanimity and mag- 
nanimity." Even the idolatrous Miss Jewsbury ad- 
mits that Jane was provoking ; and this is certain, 
that she was very well able to take care of her- 
self, and that Froude's vision of her as the sweet, 
forlorn, submissive spouse of an irritable, inconsid- 
erate and violent husband, is either the illusion of 
an exuberant imagination or the creation of a ma- 
licious caricaturist. Mr. Percy Fitzgerald says : " I 
used often of a Sunday to go and talk with the late 
Mrs. Forster, who was a shrewd and very observ- 
ant lady. She met all her husband's many friends 
and knew a great deal. I remember her talking 
much of the Carlyles and their menage, and once I 
said — albeit a friend and admirer of Thomas — that 
she must have had a rough time. Mrs. Forster 
smiled, and said, 'Don't you believe all that! She 
was rather an actress, and liked to pose as a martyr, 
talking of her sufferings and getting sympathy. I 
assure you he was the great sufferer.' " Lady East- 
lake wrote in her " Letters and Memorials," " Mrs. 
Carlyle interested me ; she is lively and clever, and 
evidently very happy." 

In view of what Froude tells us as to the " Niagaras 

21 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

of scorn and vituperation " which Carlyle poured out 
for hours together in his wife's presence, one would 
have thought that it would have been a relief to her 
to be left alone and that she must have thanked 
Heaven when her husband shut himself up in his 
sound-proof room. But not at all. Froude will not 
have it so. This was an additional grievance. " She 
was very much alone." Carlyle, whom Froude is 
now, with tears in his eyes and a tremor in his voice, 
unveiling to us as the thoroughly bad man he was, 
was not only violent to his wife but neglectful of her. 
He was engrossed in his own pursuits, "she rarely 
saw him, except at meal-times. She sat by herself in 
her drawing-room, either reading or entertaining 
visitors who bored her and of whom she dared 
not ask him to relieve her." She was a sad, soli- 
tary, stricken woman; the glaring absurdity of all 
which, may perhaps be best demonstrated by re- 
counting the ordinary routine of daily life at Cheyne 
Row. 

Carlyle rose at 7.30, had his bath and went out for 
a short walk. He breakfasted about 9, and after 
smoking a pipe, reading the newspaper (when he 
took one in, which was not always), and conversing 
with his wife, he retired to his study. When he was 
engaged in writing anything, he worked steadily till 
I or 1.30, when he had his luncheon while Mrs. 
Carlyle dined, his luncheon being light and consist- 
ing generally of a cup of beef-tea or a biscuit and a 
glass of sherry„ Then he went out walking, accom- 
panied by his wife when she was able to walk. 

When he had a horse, he rode for two hours in the 

22 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

afternoon, getting in an hour before dinner which 
was generally at 5 or 6, but the hour was frequently 
changed. Before dinner he was joined by Mrs. 
Carlyle, who talked to him and told him the news of 
the day while he was dining and while he lay on the 
sofa, when the meal was over. After dinner, when 
they were not invited out, they spent the whole even- 
ing together, reading or chatting with any guests who 
chanced to call. This was the general routine, but 
when he was not engaged in any special task, Carlyle 
rarely retired to his study, but read beside his wife. 
And sometimes even when he was writing she was 
his companion. He says: "Wife and I sat together 
in the library-room, as the warmest, all the time I 
was writing 'Scott.'" 

Now, is it not apparent that Froude has again 
attempted to mislead his readers in representing 
Mrs. Carlyle as being left much alone by a callous 
husband, careful about his own interests and nought 
else, and that as a matter of fact she had more of her 
husband's society than married ladies of a certain 
age generally have? Beyond the riding exercise, 
which he took with a view to the maintenance of 
his working power, on which his bread depended, 
Carlyle had no pursuits or amusements apart from 
his home. He was not a club-man or sportsman or 
billiard-player. He spent his leisure at his own fire- 
side with his wife and friends and it was his wife's 
own choice if she did not accompany him on his very 
occasional excursions into society at Bath House or 
Addiscombe. His visits to Scotland were made that 
he might see his kindred or recover his health, and 

23 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

during them he wrote to his wife daily, not laconic 
notes, but richly effusive letters, which she so hun- 
gered for, that she had an hysterical attack if the post 
failed to bring one. What modern husband does as 
much? How many twentieth-century wives can 
boast of as much uxorial devotion ? 

Mrs. Carlyle was no Mariana in a Moated Grange, 
dreary and deserted, but a highly appreciated wife, 
whose complaint was that she had too much and not 
too little society. "So long as I am in what the 
French call 'my room of reception,'" she says, "it 
never occurs to me to feel lonely." " It is odd," she 
remarks, in another place, " what notions men have 
of the scantiness of a woman's resources. They do 
not find it anything out of nature that they should 
exist by themselves, but a woman must always be 
borne about on somebody's shoulders, and dandled 
or chirped to, or it is supposed she will fall into the 
blackest melancholy." " I have as much society as 
I like, but I prefer none when I am ill." 

But Mrs. Carlyle had other interests and enjoy- 
ments beyond those which society afforded. She 
keenly relished the management of her little house- 
hold and the conquest of those practical problems 
which, for many years, their limited means made 
difficult of solution. She had been brought up to 
take part in household work ; she revelled in economic 
contrivances, and even her " earthquakes " or annual 
cleanings brought her a grim satisfaction. But here 
again the lugubrious Froude shakes his head. She 
was " a household drudge," quoth he, and in saying 

that in " My Relations with Carlyle " he is merely 

24 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

disinterring those old misinterpretations of his which 
were killed and buried long ago. 

It was in connection with the life at Craigenputtock 
that Froude first made this charge. He depicted 
that as one round of menial drudgery for Mrs. Carlyle, 
unsolaced by more than an occasional word of 
encouragement, sympathy, or compassion from her 
husband. " Every household duty fell upon her, 
either directly, or in supplying the shortcomings of a 
Scotch maid-of-all-work. She had to cook, to sew, to 
scour, to clean; to gallop down alone to Dumfries 
if anything was wanted ; to keep the house, and even 
on occasions to milk the cows." The story of the 
hard time this poor woman had to pass at Craigen- 
puttock, Froude derived from Miss Geraldine Jews- 
bury's recollection, and he had the effrontery to ad- 
here to it and to introduce it into the '* Early Life " 
after he had himself published Carlyle's denial of it, 
generally and in detail. 

" Geraldine's Craigenputtock stories," Carlyle wrote, 
" are more mythical than any of the rest. Each con- 
sists of two or three in confused exaggerated state 
rolled with new confusion into one," and then he 
goes on to show that his wife's participation in any 
of the menial occupations enumerated by Froude 
must have had a spice of frolic or adventure in it, as 
there were a servant and milk-maid and farm men at 
call, zealous to help the young couple. He states 
explicitly that the happiest and wholesomest days of 
their married life were these seven years spent at 
Craigenputtock, where his helpmate made the desert 
blossom and converted into a fairy palace " the wild 

2S 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

moorland home of the poor man." And in all this 
he is fully borne out by the testimony of that help- 
mate herself. Her letters, dated from Craigenput- 
tock, are bright as the unpolluted sunshine on the 
mountain, breezy as the atmosphere that undulated 
around her ; lucent and hopefully babbling like the 
streams that hurried to the valley below. And more 
than that, they teem with expressions of joyous 
satisfaction with her lot, and contain direct contra- 
dictions of every one of Froude's allegations. To 
" this dreariest spot in all the British dominions," as 
Froude, with pitiable topographical insensibility, de- 
scribed it, she was glad to return from Edinburgh and 
from Templand when visiting her mother; and from 
it, after four years' experience of it, she wrote to Miss 
Eliza Miles, " For my part I am very content. I 
have everything here my heart desires that I could 
have anywhere else, except society, and even that 
deprivation is not wholly an evil. . . . My husband 
is as good company as reasonable mortal could desire. 
Every fair morning we ride on horseback for an hour 
before breakfast. . . . Then we eat such a surprising 
breakfast of home-baked bread and eggs, &c., &c., as 
might incite anyone that had breakfasted so long in 
London to write a pastoral. Then Carlyle takes to 
his writing, while I, like Eve, 'studious of household 
good,' inspect my house, my garden, my live stock, 
gather flowers for my drawing-room, and lapfuls of 
eggs, and finally betake myself also to writing or read- 
ing, or mending, or whatever work seems fittest. 
After dinner, and only then, I lie on the sofa, and (to 

my shame be it spoken) sometimes sleep, but oftenest 

26 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

dream waking. ... In the evening I walk on the 
moor and read. Such is my Hfe." And one is 
tempted to ask what was wrong with it, in the case of 
a young Scotchwoman, reared in the frugal home of 
a country doctor, whose husband was earning his 
living by his pen, and, as she even then knew, laying 
the foundation of a great reputation ? 

To Miss Stodart Mrs. Carlyle wrote: "Indeed, 
Craigenputtock is no such frightful place as the 
people call it. ... I read and work and talk with 
my husband and am never weary. I ride over to 
Templand [to see her mother]. Grace Macdonald 
[that is Froude's Scotch maid-of-all-work with her 
short-comings] is turning out a most excellent ser- 
vant, and seems the carefullest, honestest creature 
living." ..." The fact is I have no delight in cows, 
and have happily no concern with them," and so on. 
Every statement that Froude made about the 
Craigenputtock life has been specifically traversed 
by Mrs. Carlyle herself, and yet, knowing this, he 
ventured to put them forward, and although his 
attention was called to their incorrectness he never 
had the grace to contradict them. As was her 
manner, Mrs. Carlyle often dilates with mock and 
merry consternation on her housewife difficulties, 
and amplifies into haystacks the molehills that 
obstructed her path, but no one with a milligram of 
humour could take these sallies seriously. Looking 
back on these old times when she was ill and 
depressed, the far slanting shadows may have dark- 
ened them and caused her to speak of them with 

repugnance and gloom, but the chronicles she has 

27 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

left of them prove that they were full of healthful 
activity and tranquil happiness. 

Froude does not refer to the Craigenputtock stories 
in " My Relations with Carlyle," but he still repre- 
sents Mrs. Carlyle as a household drudge in London, 
thus repeating a thrice-refuted fallacy. The care and 
direction of her small establishment was no heavy 
burden to her, and to have attempted to relieve her 
of it would have been to give her pain. " Perfection 
of housekeeping was," said Carlyle, " her clear and 
speedy attainment," and as a woman takes pride in 
doing that which she can do well, Mrs. Carlyle gloried 
in her marketings, and mendings, and lustrations, and 
recounts, with exquisite burlesque, her experiences of 
her domestic servants. That she had for many years 
only one servant was her own choice ; her husband 
urged her to have two, but she long resisted his 
entreaties, and when at last she yielded to them was 
miserable until the second servant was got out of the 
house. " So I am now mistress of two servants," she 
wrote, "and ready to hang myself. Seriously the 
change is nearly intolerable to me, though both these 
women are good servants, as servants go. But the 
twoness! The much ado about nothing!" In all 
domestic affairs it was she and not her husband who 
restricted expenditure. "With great difficulty," he 
writes, " I had got her induced, persuaded, com- 
manded to take two weekly drives in a hired 
brougham (more difficulty in persuading you to go 
into any expense than other men have to persuade 
their wives to keep out of it)." Instead of being "a 
household drudge," she had often not enough to do, 

28 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

and it might have been an advantage to her if, in the 
absence of children, she had taken up some definite 
employment. For serious literary work she had not 
sufficient persistence. The letters were brilliant 
spurts, but a continuous flow she could not maintain, 
although her husband gave her every encouragement. 
In 1842 he wrote to her: "My prayer is and has 
always been that you would rouse up the fine facul- 
ties that are yours, into some course of real true work 
which you felt to be worthy of them and of you. . . . 
I will never give up the hope to see you adequately 
busy with your whole mind, discovering, as all human 
beings may do, that even in the grimmest rocky 
wilderness of existence there are blessed well-springs, 
there is an everlasting guiding star. Courage, my 
poor little Jeannie." In July of the same year he 
wrote to his brother Alick : " Jane is still altogether 
weakly, but she grows better ; time alone can alleviate 
that kind of sorrow [the loss of her mother]. She is 
left very lonely in this world now ; her kindred mostly 
gone ; very few of the people vaguely called 'friends ' 
worth much to her ! It would be better for her also 
if she had more imperative employment to follow : a 
small portion of the day suffices for all her obligatory 
work, and the rest, when she cannot seek work for 
herself, is apt to be spent in sorrowful reflexions." 

Having shown to his own satisfaction that Mrs. 
Carlyle was on one hand bullied by her husband and 
on the other neglected, Froude next proceeds to 
assure us that she was sarcastic when she spoke of 
him, " a curious blending of pity, contempt, and other 
feelings." And no wonder, if Froude is right; but 

29 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

in a matter like this we cannot entirely depend on 
his ipse dixit, and, until some one can point out a 
single utterance in any one of Mrs. Carlyle's writings 
betokening pity or contempt of her husband, we shall 
believe that Froude is once more indulging in one 
of his imaginary conversations. She had a sharp 
tongue : angry words about her husband sometimes 
escaped her. He and she now and then no doubt 
exchanged taunts in private, and in company they 
chaffed and quizzed each other unmercifully, but 
that she had ever expressed pity and contempt for 
him, to one of his professing friends, behind his back, 
is unbelievable. Why, pride in him was the mainstay 
of her life. " Thanks, Darling," writes Carlyle, " for 
your shining words and acts, which were continual 
in my eyes, and in no other mortal's. Worthless I 
was your divinity ; wrapt in your perpetual love of me 
and pride in me, in defiance of all men and things." 
" She had from an early period," wrote her sorrow- 
ing husband, " formed her own little opinion of me 
(what an Eldorado to me blind, ungrateful, condem- 
nable, and heavy-laden, and crushed down into blind- 
ness by great misery, as I oftenest was), and she never 
flinched from it for an instant, I think, or cared or 
counted what the world said to the contrary (very 
brave, magnanimous, and noble truly she was in all 
this), but to have the world confirm her in it was 
always a sensible pleasure which she took no pains 
to hide especially from me." She was an honour- 
able woman and a faithful wife, and could not have 
been guilty of the treachery that Froude ascribes 
to her. In 1846, after twenty years of married life, 

30 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

when all her husband's faults and weaknesses must 
have been known to her, she wrote to him : " I have 
grown to love you the longer, the more, till now you 
are grown to be the whole universe, God, everything 
to me, but in proportion as I have got to know all 
your importance to me, I have been losing faith in 
my importance to you." Is this pity and contempt? 
It was necessary to show some ground for Mrs. 
Carlyle's alleged pity and contempt of her husband, 
and so Froude reduces him to the rank of a miserable 
egotist and valetudinarian. He suffered, he admits, 
from dyspepsia and want of sleep, but whereas his 
wife " was expected to bear her trouble in patience, 
and received hints on the duty of submission if she 
spoke impatiently, he was never more eloquent than 
in speaking of his own crosses." He himself, Froude 
opines, "had really a vigorous constitution. He 
never had a day's serious illness. He used to ride 
and walk in the wildest weather." Carlyle was 
therefore in point of fact a malingerer, or a ro- 
bust invalid, selfishly and querulously vexing those 
around him by his unmanly appeals for sympathy in 
his purely imaginary ailments. Hypochondria in 
Froude 's eyes is a sort of sick-robe, put on for toilet 
purposes, and that can be laid aside at pleasure. He 
never himself suffered from it, but he ought to have 
remembered, even in his eagerness to prove Carlyle 
an impostor, that many other men of genius have 
suffered in exactly the same way. Hypochondria 
is, indeed, a frequent accompaniment of great intel- 
lectual activity. That Carlyle had naturally a fine 
constitution may be inferred from the age to which 

31 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

he lived, but length of days is not incompatible with 
a suffering existence. The active exercise he took 
was essential to alleviate the irritability of the nervous 
system, which his strenuous work induced, and he 
was, from first to last, one of those workers to whom 
production was not facile but arduous and exhausting. 
Hypochondria is a terribly real disease ; often, as all 
medical men know, involving more distress than 
graver and more mortal maladies. Dyspepsia and 
insomnia combined, as literary men do not require 
to be told, may prove afflictive and incapacitating to 
an extraordinary degree. They have driven many a 
man of rare ability and promise to madness and 
suicide, and that Carlyle did not succumb to them, 
in the concentrated form and inveterate type, in which 
they attacked him, is evidence of his fortitude and 
will power. From his twenty-fourth year until his 
work was laid aside they never left him alone, and 
there can be no question that they often caused him 
what he called torture and purgatorial pains. The 
dyspepsia was set up by the ill-cooked and somewhat 
scanty food supplied to him when he was living 
in lodgings in Edinburgh on 15^. a week, and in 
Kirkaldy on ;^6o a year, out of which he helped his 
family, and bravely working his way, and the insomnia 
followed in its train, when he began to overtax his 
brain. Froude makes light of Carlyle 's sufferings, 
and in order to bring him into contempt hints that 
he roared loudly when little hurt. The many doctors 
he consulted did not think so, nor did his wife, who 
best knew what he endured, and was unflagging in 
her sympathy and efforts to devise alleviations. He 

32 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

grasped at all feasible remedies, and even for some 
years gave up smoking, his chief solace, in the hope 
of obtaining relief. 

But while Carlyle was in Froude's view shamming, 
Mrs. Carlyle was really suffering poignantly from the 
effects of his cruel and inconsiderate treatment of 
her. "In 1862," says Froude, "her health finally 
broke down, and there came on that strange illness 
which doctors failed to understand, or if they under- 
stood it, they did not venture to speak plainly " — a 
sentence which includes two erroneous statements 
and an unwarrantable reflexion on Mrs. Carlyle's 
medical advisers. The final breakdown in her health 
occurred not in 1862, but in 1863, and was the imme- 
diate result of shock and injury sustained in a serious 
street accident in the City. Her illness was not at 
all strange, and was well understood by her doctors 
as the culmination of a nervous affection, the seeds 
of which were born with her, fostered by her bring- 
ing up, and brought to full growth and fruition 
by the circumstances of her life. Her doctors 
would not have hesitated to speak plainly had they 
agreed with Froude that it was her husband's " wild 
irritability" that had shattered her nerves; and how 
utterly reckless Froude's assertions are may be real- 
ised when we read a few lines further on in his 
pamphlet that these doctors whom he had just 
accused of poltroonery " insisted as a first necessity 
on her separation from him pier husband] , the con- 
stant agitation of his presence and the equally con- 
stant provocation which his f orgetf ulness and preoccu- 
pation made incessant in spite of efforts, taking away 
3 33 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

all hope of amendment while the cause remained " — 
a statement which is equally erroneous with all the 
rest. The doctors never insisted on Mrs. Carlyle's 
separation from her husband, and never attributed 
her condition to his irritability. " By everybody it 
had been agreed," wrote Carlyle, " that a change of 
scene (as usual when all else has failed) was the thing 
to be looked to: St. Leonard's as soon as the weather 
will permit, said Dr. Quain and everybody, especially 
Dr. Blakiston;" and it is remarkable that if the 
doctors regarded separation from her husband " as a 
first necessity," she was not removed to St. Leon- 
ard's until March, 1864, although her illness began in 
October, 1863. That Mrs. Carlyle did not regard 
separation from her husband as either necessary or 
healing may be gathered from her tenderly affection- 
ate letters to him from St. Leonard's. No sooner 
had she arrived there than she wrote to him, " Oh, I 
would like you beside me! I am so terribly alone !'' 
"She had been again and again given up," says 
Froude, blundering on ; but nobody ever gave her 
up, and she died ultimately, not from the nervous 
malady from which she was suffering in 1863, but 
from heart failure. She was, of course, despondent 
about herself, but that was an inevitable part of her 
illness, and the anxiety of her doctors was connected 
more with her mental than with her physical state. 
She said of herself, " The actual suffering if cleared 
of the aggravations of the Imagination would be 
nothing to make a fuss about." "Suddenly, as if 
from the grave," exclaims Froude, " she came back ; " 
but the recovery which began in July, 1864, was very 

34 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

gradual, and was not complete until October of that 
year, if then. "She still mocked to me," goes on 
Froude, "about him [Carlyle], and the old resent- 
ment was there, though it showed itself less." If 
she did so, she must have been the most deceitful of 
women, for at this very time she was writing to her 
friends pouring forth her gratitude to her husband 
for his solicitous care of her. " I cannot tell you," 
she wrote to Mrs. Austin, " how kind and good Mr. 
Carlyle is ! " " The injury had gone too deep," 
proceeds the sepulchral Froude. ..." Her nerves 
had been so shaken by her many years of suffering 
that some singular disease had developed itself, I 
believe, in her spine." But Mrs. Carlyle never had 
anything the matter with her spine, her nervous dis- 
ease was in no degree singular, and had in it in its later 
stages a large element of hysteria, and she died, as 
we have said, of heart failure, from which she had 
suffered at intervals for many years. 

No one can, we think, read Froude 's account of 
Mrs. Carlyle 's illness in the light of the explanations 
now given, without feeling that it was throughout 
calculated to create prejudice against her husband, 
whom he almost accuses of having caused her death. 
No one can read it and not realise that it is typical 
of Froude 's treatment of Carlyle in other matters, 
without understanding the indignation that his 
elaborate fabrications have induced amongst Carlyle 's 
friends. 

Froude set himself, in writing " My Relations with 
Carlyle," to improve on the mixed picture of the Life 
and to exhibit him as a hard, heartless man with no 

35 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

redeeming traits of character. " He made little of 
other people's sufferings," he says. But is this true? 
" Miss Martineau," says Professor Masson, " in her 
description of Carlyle from her own knowledge, 
actually singled out for special note, as that in his 
character which distinguished him most from all 
other men she had seen, his enormous power of 
sympathy. It was a most correct observation. No 
one who knew Carlyle but must have noted how 
instantaneously he was affected or even agitated by 
any case of difificulty or distress in which he was 
consulted or that was casually brought to his cogni- 
sance, and with what restless curiosity and exactitude 
he would inquire into all the particulars, till he had 
conceived the case thoroughly, and, as it were, taken 
the whole pain of it into himself. The practical 
procedure, if any was possible, was sure to follow." 
This very Froude, who declares that Carlyle made 
little of other people's sufferings, had written else- 
where — he must have forgotten it — " I had not ex- 
pected so much detailed compassion in little things. 
I found that personal sympathy with suffering lay at 
the root of all his thoughts; and that attention to 
little things was as characteristic of his conduct as it 
was of his intellect." In another place he wrote — 
" No one, however, can read these letters [his letters 
to his wife] or ten thousand like them without recog- 
nising the affectionate tenderness which lay at the 
bottom of his nature." No one can recall the inci- 
dents of Carlyle's career, his contributions to one 
brother's education and to another's farming, when 
he was still poor and struggling, his frequent little 

36 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

gifts to his father and mother, his never-forgotten 
birthday presents to his wife, his exertions on behalf 
of the Misses Lowes, and scores of Hke acts, with- 
out recognising that he was a thoughtful, sympathetic 
and large-hearted man, and that Froude has cruelly 
maligned him. How did this man, who was, Froude 
tells us, in the habit of " bursting into violence at the 
smallest and absurdest provocations," comport him- 
self at that terrible juncture when John Stuart Mill 
came to announce the burning of the first volume 
of the manuscript of the " French Revolution " ? He 
never lost his composure, and the first words he spoke 
to his wife when Mill was gone were, " Well, Mill, 
poor fellow, is very miserable. We must try to keep 
from him how serious the loss is to us." 

But not only, Froude would have us believe, did 
Carlyle shatter his wife's nerves and shorten her 
days, he also made cruel shipwreck of her faith. 
" She had accepted," he writes, " the destructive part 
of his opinions like so many others, but he had failed 
to satisfy her that he knew where positive truth lay. 
He had taken from her, as she mournfully said [when 
did she say it, or where? save in one of Froude's im- 
aginary conversations], the creed in which she had 
been bred, but he had been unable to put anything in 
place of it. She believed nothing. On the spiritual 
side of things her mind was a perfect blank; she 
looked into her own heart and into the world beyond 
her, and it was all void and desert ; there was no word 
of consolation, no word of hope." It is strange that 
these teachings of Carlyle, which produced on Froude 
what he calls "a conviction of sin," which taught 

37 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

him the intense seriousness of life, and awakened 
him to the meaning of duty and the overpowering 
obligation to do it, and " saved him from atheism," 
as he has informed us, thus enlarging and bracing 
his existence, should have had such an opposite 
effect on Mrs. Carlyle, rendering her hopeless and 
void. One would have thought that this thoughtful 
woman, the most brilliant and interesting Froude 
had ever fallen in with, would have been influenced 
by Carlyle 's doctrine very much as Froude himself 
was. But not so. What was his meat was her 
poison. Froude was redeemed, Mrs. Carlyle was 
cast into outer darkness. 

Long before her marriage, Miss Jane Welsh had 
emancipated herself from the creed in which she was 
brought up. When she was still a school-girl at 
Haddington, so Froude tells us, " her tutor introduced 
her to 'Virgil,' and the effect of 'Virgil' and her 
other Latin studies was to change her religion and 
make her into a sort of Pagan." And a sort of 
Pagan she ever afterwards remained. Her words 
were as follows : " That my Latin studies pursued 
far too closely and strenuously for so young a girl 
had changed my religion, if I could be said to have 
one, is strictly true, and it wasn't my religion only 
that they influenced, my whole being was imbued 
with them." In giving this passage Froude has 
omitted, surely, we are entitled to say, has curiously 
omitted, the words, " if I could be said to have one," 
ix.^ a religion. The letter which she wrote to her 
grandmother, on the occasion of her father's death 
when she was eighteen years old, is a clear proof that 

38 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

she had then parted company with revealed truth, as 
taught in the Church of Scotland. She bows to the 
chastisement of the Divine Power, and acknowledges 
that the ways of the Almighty are mysterious ; but 
there is not, in that letter, one ray of Christian faith 
or hope. No believing Scottish girl of the period 
could possibly have written such a letter under such 
circumstances. 

That Miss Welsh had shed whatever faith she 
once possessed and had developed some of the 
unlovely traits of character which so often accompany 
that disrobement in a woman, long before she fell 
under the influence of Carlyle, is abundantly clear. 
In 182 1, that is to say in the year in which Carlyle 
was introduced to her, we find Edward Irving 
expressing serious anxiety as to her spiritual state. 
He had laboured with all his energies to lead his 
pupil to think of Christianity as he did himself, but 
he had serious misgivings respecting her. " She con- 
templates," he wrote to Carlyle, "the inferiority of 
others rather from the point of ridicule and contempt 
than from that of commiseration and relief ; and by 
so doing she not only leaves objects in distress and 
loses the luxury of doing good, but she contracts in 
her own mind a degree of coldness and bitterness 
which suits ill with my conception of female character 
and a female's station in society. ... I could like to 
see her surrounded with a more sober set of compan- 
ions than Rousseau and Byron and such like. ... I 
fear Jane has already dipped too deep into that 
spring, so that unless some more solid food be 
afforded I fear she will escape altogether out of the 

39 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

region of my sympathies and the sympathies of 
honest home-bred men. In these feelings I know 
you will join me." In 1822, Irving wrote to Miss 
Welsh herself, " Now it does give me great hope 
that God will yet be pleased to open your mind to 
the highest of all knowledge, the knowledge of His 
Blessed Son, and give therewith the highest of all 
delights, of being like His Son in character and in 
destiny, when I see you not alienated from men of 
genius by their being men of religion, but attracted 
to them I think rather the more. I could wish indeed 
— and forgive me when I make free to suggest it — 
that your mind were less anxious for the distinction 
of being enrolled amongst those whom this world has 
crowned with their admiration, than among those 
whom God has crowned with His approval. . . . Oh, 
how few I find, my dear Jane, hardly have I found a 
single one, who can stand the intoxication of high 
talents or resist presuming to lord it over others." 

In Carlyle's numerous letters to Miss Welsh, from 
his introduction to her in 1821 till their marriage in 
1826, there is not a sentence calculated to inspire 
doubt, while there is much that ought to have exalted 
her moral nature, and after marriage his creed might 
have saved her from blank scepticism had she chosen 
to accept it. But she was a worldly little woman, 
and her Godlessness, until she was by severe illness 
brought back to some semblance of piety, was perhaps 
a rather disenchanting element in her character. 
Froude would have us believe that in relation to his 
wife Carlyle was an iconoclast and a faith wrecker, an 
atheist of the most blatant type. But what are the 

40 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

facts — the facts of things — as Carlyle would have had 
it ? He was a fervid Theist, proclaiming the existence 
of God with as much earnestness and insistence as the 
inspired camel-driver of Arabia. He was an intensely 
religious man, who, while rejecting theologic dogmas 
and formulas, accepted Christianity in its ethical 
aspects, and was never tired of preaching truth, 
honesty, temperance, mercy, humility and God-fear- 
ing. He had the deepest reverence for the life and 
character of Christ as represented in the Gospels. 
He retained a conviction of the efficacy of prayer, 
and had a lurking belief in a Particular Providence, 
and a clinging hope of the immortality of the soul. 
When stricken in years he found that expression was 
best given to his spiritual needs in Pope's verses in 
the " Universal Prayer " — 

" Father of All ! in every age, 
In every clime, adored, 
By saint, by savage, and by sage, 
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord ! 

Thou Great First-Cause, least understood, 

Who all my sense confined 
To know but this, that Thou art good. 

And that myself am blind." 

" Not a word of that," he wrote in 1868, " requires 
change from me at this time, if words are to be used 
at all." 

Carlyle 's creed might have given some support to 
Jane Welsh and filled up the blank in her mind had 
she been able to grasp it and believe that the Maker 
of all things will do right ; but, as clever, self-sufficient 
women are apt to do when they have thrown away 

41 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

faith, she went to the extreme of scepticism. Per- 
haps if she had read " The Nemesis of Faith " she 
might have been cured of her doubts. That she 
was what she was, was no fault of Carlyle's. Had 
she remained in the fold in which she was brought 
up, he would never have called her out of it, for he 
recognised that spiritual truth may have many differ- 
ent vestments. After his own re-birth we find him 
writing to his aged mother thus: " Often, my dear 
mother, in solitary pensive moments, does it come 
across me like the cold shadow of death that we two 
must part in the course of time. I shudder at the 
thought, and find no refuge except in humbly trust- 
ing that the great God will surely appoint us a 
meeting in that far country to which we are tending. 
May He bless you for ever, my dear mother, and 
keep up in your heart the sublime hopes which 
at present serve as a pillar of cloud by day and 
a pillar of fire by night, to guide our footsteps 
through the wilderness of life. We are in His 
hands. He will not utterly forsake us. Let us trust 

• T T' " 

m Him. 

Two years before her death, when his wife was 
visiting Dr. Russell at Thornhill amidst the scenes 
of her girlhood, Carlyle wrote to her: " What strange 
old days (sunk like old ages) you look out upon from 
your windows there, my poor heavy-laden little 
woman. Yes; but it is forever true 'The Eternal 
rules above us ' and in us and around us; and this is 
not Hell or Hades but the 'Place of Hope' — the 
Place where what is right will h^ fulfilled. And you 
know that, too, in your way, my own little Jeannie — 

42 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

and you will not and must not forget it ; forgetting 
it one would go mad." 

But all this was hypocrisy, Froude suggests. " I 
suppose," he remarks of Carlyle, "that his own 
inconsistencies interfered with the effect of his teach- 
ing. He 'recked not his own rede,' and those whose 
practice falls short of their theories do not seem to 
believe really in their theories themselves." So Mrs. 
Carlyle knew her husband for an impostor, and 
laughed in her sleeve at his invocations of the 
Silences, the Eternities, etc. And yet of this very 
man, whom Froude thus estimates, in 1887, he had 
written to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle in 1880: "I have 
been reading over the letters to his mother and 
brothers. They are so admirable, and give so full a 
picture of his inner life — so consistent from first to 
last, that I think, when the * Reminiscences ' are 
published, these letters ought to form an accompany- 
ing volume. No life could be written which would 
furnish so complete a conception of him — of his own 
nature and of the circumstances under which he had 
to work." 

We have thus far followed Froude in his pamphlet, 
" My Relations with Carlyle," and have found it really 
an exposition of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle's relations with 
each other. If we ask what the impression left by 
this exposition is, the answer must surely be that 
Carlyle, if Froude is to be believed, was a bully and 
a brute, selfish and vaporish, incessantly wrangling 
with his unhappy wife whom he neglected, ill-treated, 
compelled to engage in menial offices and alienated 
from religion, thus undermining her health and 

43 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

hastening her death. Fine phrases are all very well, 
but they cannot obscure the " facts of things," if they 
are facts, and when Froude tells us that he did not 
allow his reverence and admiration for Carlyle's 
intellect and high moral greatness to be interfered 
with by what he saw and heard, we can only marvel 
at his moral obtuseness and his heedlessness in writ- 
ing down his own condemnation. Nay, it must be 
said that if his tale is true, there was more than moral 
obtuseness in Froude 's conduct; there was cowardly 
acquiescence in a flagrant wrong. For six years, by 
his own account, he stood by, consenting to the slow 
martyrdom of a woman whom he has described as 
bright and sparkling and tender, and uttered no word 
of remonstrance or protest. He saw her involved in 
a perpetual blizzard, and did nothing to shelter her. 
He witnessed at Cheyne Row the enactment of " a 
tragedy as stern and real as the story of CEdipus," 
but it was no business of his. It was enough for him 
to be admitted to the Cheyne Row tea parties and 
enjoy the brilliancy of the conversation. Froude's 
representatives must ultimately feel grateful to us for 
showing that he was not altogether as callous as he 
has endeavoured to prove himself to have been. 

For what we have heard hitherto about Carlyle 
from Froude, Froude is himself responsible. For 
the general description of the life at Cheyne Row 
and of Carlyle's treatment of his wife, he has, in " My 
Relations with Carlyle," drawn entirely on his own 
reminiscences. We are expected to receive with 
faith his recollections of what he noticed and of the 
gossip he heard when admitted to Carlyle's family 

44 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

circle, which, with an unparalleled abuse of hospi- 
tality, he has made use of to sully the good name of 
his host. No particular instance is recalled; no 
confirmatory evidence is quoted; no documentary 
corroboration ^is referred to. The charges rest on 
the unsupported testimony of an habitual blunderer. 

But besides the general charges against Carlyle in 
connection with his treatment of his wife, which 
Froude has made, he has three specific charges to 
bring forward, and for these, while he has adopted 
and published them, he does not make himself directly 
answerable. They are grave charges. One impugns 
Carlyle 's conduct in connection with his friendship 
with Lady Ashburton. Another traces the unhappi- 
ness of his married life to a physical defect under 
which, it is alleged, he laboured, and which made his 
marriage no marriage. A third accuses him of using 
personal violence to his wife. Each of these three 
charges rests exclusively upon the evidence of one 
witness, and in each case that witness is the same 
person, Miss Geraldlne Jewsbury. The whole edifice 
of imputation which Froude has with so much in- 
genuity and apparent ingenuousness erected, rests 
solely on confidential communications made to him 
by this lady, and the first and most essential point to 
determine is her credibility. 

Froude did not, of course, fail to realise this. He 
perceived that it was of paramount importance to his 
case that Miss Jewsbury should be believed, and he 
has therefore taken pains to show that she had the 
best opportunities of knowing what she spoke about, 
and was a faithful, guileless creature ; and in doing 

45 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

this he has resorted to methods which are certainly 
not characterised by an excess of scrupulosity. Mrs. 
Carlyle, he tells us, spoke and wrote of Geraldine 
Jewsbury as her Consuelo ; but if she did so, she must 
have used the appellation in an ironical sense, for 
their correspondence proves that she never took any 
bit of advice Miss Jewsbury offered, snubbed her 
peremptorily whenever she ventured to express an 
opinion, and looked upon her sometimes more as an 
exasperator than as a comforter. That they were 
often on terms of close intimacy is true. Miss Jews- 
bury was a gifted woman who had introduced herself 
to Carlyle by writing to him as one of his ardent 
worshippers, and became a hanger-on of the Cheyne 
Row household. But her intimacy with Mrs. Carlyle 
was not of the sort which Froude would have us 
believe, and which he indicates by the incorrect state- 
ment that Miss Jewsbury " was about Mrs. Carlyle's 
own age " : the truth being that there were eleven 
years between them — Mrs. Carlyle having been born 
in 1801, and Miss Jewsbury in 181 2. Miss Jewsbury 
was never admitted to the penetralia of Mrs. Carlyle's 
thoughts and feelings, but was kept waiting and 
serving in the courts without, and there was always 
an element of patronage and protection in Mrs. 
Carlyle's attitude towards her. Mrs. Carlyle was 
flattered by the worship she offered, and was grateful 
for the many delicate attentions she bestowed ; but 
from first to last she treated her as a weak and a 
wayward being, destitute of discretion and good 
sense, and it is surely a significant fact that Froude 
deliberately suppressed every letter of Mrs. Carlyle's 

46 



THE NEMESIS OFFROUDE 

in which her candid opinion of her friend Is set forth. 
In the " Letters and Memorials " that Froude selected 
and edited, there Is nothing reflecting unfavourably 
on Miss Jewsbury, whereas In the " New Letters and 
Memorials" may be found abundant proofs of the 
light esteem In which Mrs. Carlyle held her. She 
described her as a fussy, romantic, hysterical woman, 
a considerable fool, with her head packed full of 
nonsense, and nick-named her " Miss Gooseberry." 
"It is her besetting sin," she said, "and her trade 
of novelist has aggravated it — the desire of feeling 
and producing violent emotions." Miss Jewsbury's 
Intrigues and love affairs are often contemptuously 
alluded to by Mrs. Carlyle. " Geraldlne," she wrote, 
" has one besetting weakness. She is never happy 
unless she has a grande passioit on hand, and as 
unmarried men take fright at her impulsive and 
demonstrative ways, her grandes passions for these 
thirty years have been all expended on married 
men." In another place she mentions that she was 
"openly making the craziest love to a man" who 
was engaged to be married, and in another that 
she was " in a frenzy over a letter from her declared 
lover, an Egyptian," who had one wife already, and 
in still another that she had herself allowed that she 
had " absolutely no sense of decency." And beyond 
all this Miss Jewsbury's feelings towards Mrs. Carlyle 
herself, which were well-known to Froude, were of a 
nature that should have made him pause before 
listening to her revelations on ticklish topics. They 
were highly extravagant, and in some degree per- 
verted. The manifestation by Mrs. Carlyle of some 

47 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

preference or supposed preference for another woman 
led on one occasion to a wild outburst of what Miss 
Jewsbury herself called " tiger jealousy," which, says 
Mrs. Carlyle, " on the part of one woman towards 
another it had never entered my head to conceive. 
I am not at all sure she is not going mad." Other 
instances of violent emotional perturbations over 
Mrs. Carlyle are recorded, and the language of Miss 
Jewsbury's letters to Mrs. Carlyle, preserved by Mrs. 
Ireland, is often highly charged and erotic. It is not 
customary for a woman of thirty-two years of age to 
write to her female friend, eleven years her senior, 
in such terms as these: "You are never out of my 
thoughts one hour together; " " I think of you much 
more than if you were my lover ; " "I cannot express 
my feelings even to you — vague undefined yearnings 
to be yours in some way." Of delicate, nervous, 
highly-strung constitution. Miss Jewsbury became a 
morbid, unstable, excitable woman, constantly com- 
plaining of headaches and other ailments, and suffer- 
ing from mental depression, for she chronicles of 
herself : " For two years I lived only in short respites 
from this blackness of despair. It is not sorrow ; one 
could endure that. Oh, it is too frightful to talk 
about ! The depression which falls upon one in a 
moment, enveloping one body and soul for hours or 
days, as it may be, and the horrid, lucid interval 
which we spend in dread of its return, knowing full 
well that it will come." All the biographical details 
of Miss Jewsbury which we possess, and they are 
ample, establish that, notwithstanding her interesting 

personality, her brilliant conversational powers and 

48 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

fine literary talent, she was utterly unreliable and 
erratic, or, as Carlyle summed her up, " a flimsy tatter 
of a creature." 

In order to show that Carlyle placed some confi- 
dence in Miss Jewsbury, we are told by Froude 
that he "had requested Miss Geraldine Jewsbury, 
who had been his wife's most intimate friend, to tell 
him any biographical anecdotes which she could 
remember to have heard from Mrs. Carlyle's lips," 
and that after reading these he wrote: "Few or 
none of these narratives are correct in details, but 
there is a certain mythical truth in all or most 
of them." This in the original is as follows, being 
a letter to Miss Jewsbury: "Dear Geraldine, — Few 
or none of these Narratives are correct in all the 
details; some of them, in almost all, the details 
are incorrect. I have not read carefully beyond a 
certain point which is marked on the margin. Your 
recognition of the character is generally true and 
faithful ; little of portraiture in it that satisfies me. 
On the whole, all tends to the mythical; it is very 
strange how much of mythical there already here is ! 
As Lady Lothian set you on writing, it seems hard 
that she should not see what you have written ; but 
I wish you to take her word of hmiour that no one 
else shall; and my earnest request to you is that, 
directly yr^;;^ her Ladyship, you will bring the Book 
to me and consign it to my keeping. No need that 
an idle-gazing world should know my lost Darling's 
History, or mine; — nor will they ever; — they may 
depend upon it ! One fit service, and one only, they 
can do to Her or to Me : cease speaking of us through 
4 49 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

all eternity, as soon as they conveniently can." The 
words, " There is a certain mythical truth," etc., are 
transferred and altered by Mr. Froude from a subse- 
quent passage, and Miss Jewsbury's Narratives, which 
nobody but Lady Lothian was to see, were of course 
published in full by Froude. 

Of Miss Jewsbury's Narratives of his wife, Carlyle 
said that her accounts of her childhood were substan- 
tially correct, but as regards the rest " few or none 
are correct in all the details, some of them in almost 
all the details are incorrect." He subsequently refers 
to the Narrative as a " Book of Myths," and declares 
that they grow more and more mythical as they go 
on. " Geraldine's account of Comley Bank and life 
at Edinburgh is extremely mythic." " Geraldine's 
Craigenputtock stories are more mythical than any 
of the rest;" and it is upon these Craigenputtock 
stories, mythical of the mythic, that Froude based 
his primary indictment against Carlyle for his treat- 
ment, or rather maltreatment, of his wife. 

And this Geraldine, this weaver of myths, this 
hysterical and irresponsible woman, is the sole 
witness he has to call in support of his serious 
charges against Carlyle, two of which are now for 
the first time brought to light. 

It was in what may be called the "Ashburton 
Affair" that Froude first invoked Miss Jews- 
bury's aid — an affair in connection with which the 
injustice he has done Carlyle is made clearly apparent. 

His first knowledge of it — for he was never himself 
admitted to the Ashburton circle — came to him, he 
states, in 187 1, more probably in 1873, when a large 

50 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

parcel of papers, including the Memoir of Mrs. 
Carlyle and her Letters, handed to him by Carlyle, 
led him to place himself in communication with John 
Forster, who told him a singular story. He told 
him, he says, "that Lady Ashburton had fallen 
deeply in love with Carlyle, that Carlyle had behaved 
nobly, and that Lord Ashburton had thanked him." 
Those who knew John Forster — a generous, straight- 
forward man, trained and even sworn, as a Commis- 
sioner in Lunacy, to silence as to family secrets — will 
be chary in believing that, even had he been certain 
of all this, he would have communicated it to Froude, 
whose reputation for literary indiscretion was already 
established, and thus have compromised the reputa- 
tion of a woman of high rank and brilliant ability, of 
whose hospitality he had often partaken. But as it 
turns out that he had and could have had no founda- 
tion for the defamatory statement, it may be taken 
as certain that he never made it. Familiar as he was 
with the usages of society, knowing as he did the 
terms of close intimacy on which the Ashburtons 
and Carlyles remained after her ladsyhip's alleged 
indiscretion and Carlyle's noble conduct, it is impos- 
sible that he could have harboured such a suspicion. 
His alleged communication to Froude on the subject, 
of which no shred of corroboration can be adduced, 
may be set down therefore as one of Froude's imag- 
inary conversations. 

But even if John Forster had told Froude what he 
repeats, the introduction of the little bit of scandal 
into Froude's narrative is gratuitous and inexcusable. 
It was, he assures us, wholly untrue. Then why 

51 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

cause annoyance to Lady Ashburton's family and 
friends by referring to it at all ? Merely to secure an 
antithetical effect. The story was not only untrue, 
but the opposite of the truth. It was not, Froude now 
informs us. Lady Ashburton who was deeply in love 
with Carlyle, but Carlyle who was deeply in love with 
Lady Ashburton. And here let us mark in passing 
an illustration of the unblushing inconsistency of our 
informant. " That Carlyle should have behaved 
nobly," he writes, " under such circumstances [that 
is in rejecting Lady Ashburton's advances] seemed 
extremely likely to me," and in the next paragraph 
but one he represents Carlyle as behaving with 
detestable meanness in making love to his friend's 
wife at the very time when he was accepting favours 
at that friend's hand. This is indeed characteristic 
of Froude's handling of Carlyle. He presents him 
to us as a bundle of contrarieties and incompatibili- 
ties and mutually destructive elements such as never 
lodged together in one human body. 

It was not until 1871, according to Froude (or 1873, 
as we shall hereafter show), when he read Mrs. Car- 
lyle's Journal, that the true inwardness of the Ash- 
burton affair dawned on him. There, he says, was 
the explanation of much of the bitterness that ap- 
peared in her letters; but writing in Cuba in 1887 
he seems to have forgotten what he wrote in London 
in 1883, for then he unequivocally stated, in his note 
to the Journal, that he did not understand it and 
submitted it to Miss Geraldine Jewsbury, who sup- 
plied him with the version of the Ashburton affair, 
which he now adopts and sets forth as his own. 

52 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

Froude had no personal knowledge of the Ashbur- 
ton affair. Mrs. Carlyle's Journal remained dark to 
him. He invited Miss Jewsbury to let in the light 
on it, and she burned magnesium and strontium 
with dazzling and blinding effect. He unhesitatingly 
accepted this variety artist's interpretation of what 
was cryptic in the Journal, and in " My Relations 
with Carlyle " he presents it as his own without even 
mentioning Miss Jewsbury's name, and conveys the 
idea that it was in the papers placed in his hands 
that he himself found the solution of the Ashburton 
mystery. There he discovered, he would have us 
believe, that " Carlyle had sate at the feet of the fine 
lady, adoring and worshipping, had made himself the 
plaything of her caprices, had made Lady Ashburton 
the object of the same idolatrous homage which he 
had once paid to herself" [his wife]. 

That is a grave charge to bring against " a great 
spiritual teacher," and on the face of it somewhat 
improbable as brought against a man between fifty 
and sixty years of age, and of such a constitution 
that according to Froude he ought never to have 
married. But let Froude call his witnesses. He 
has but one. Miss Geraldine Jewsbury steps into 
the box. "This flimsy tatter of a creature," as 
Carlyle called her, this hysterical woman, this prac- 
tised romancer, this volume of " exaggerations and 
affectations and got-up feelings," is the sole prop of 
Froude's case. And how did he take her evidence ? 
Not by asking her what she knew of the affair, but 
by sending her Mrs. Carlyle's private Journal, which 
she had kept locked up and never meant human eye 

53 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

to see, and asking her to read for him between the 
Hnes of the obscure passages. The task was no 
doubt a congenial one to Miss Jewsbury. She gave 
wings to her fancy. She had never been admitted 
to the real confidence of that sensible and discreet 
woman Mrs. Carlyle, but she had no hesitation in 
imagining that she had been behind the scenes and 
had seen the actors in undress. She accused Carlyle 
of having lingered " in the primrose path of dalliance " 
and of being " a philosopher in chains " to a great 
and capricious lady, and so subjecting his poor wife 
to " sufferings real, intense, and at times too grievous 
to be borne." 

Froude instantly and implicitly accepted Miss 
Jewsbury 's key to the Ashburton cypher. Forster's 
alleged story had to be put aside, and here, again, 
crops up Froude's inaccuracy. " What," he asks, 
" was the meaning of Forster's story? He died soon 
after, and I had no opportunity of asking him." But 
Miss Jewsbury supplied her key to the Ashburton 
cypher either in 1871 or 1873, and Forster died in 
1876, and was vigorous to the last, and yet in three or 
four years Froude could not find an opportunity of 
asking him to explain an entirely erroneous story, for 
which he had made himself responsible, and to clear 
up a point vitally affecting the character of the great 
man whose life he [Froude] had undertaken to write, 
and to write, as he is always assuring us, with such 
scrupulous fidelity. Was the penny post suspended ? 
Could he not walk a mile, or spare a quarter of an 
hour? The truth is Miss Jewsbury's theory suited 
him exactly, being in harmony with his preconceived 

54 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

opinion, and he did not think it necessary to submit 
it to any close scrutiny. Carlyle lived for seven years 
after Froude was put in possession of it, and surely, 
in common justice, he ought to have been asked to 
confirm or contradict it. " I tried once," says Froude, 
" to approach the subject with Carlyle himself, but 
he shrank from it with such signs of. distress that I 
could not speak to him about it again." Strange 
conduct this on the part of a man who during four 
years never walked out with Froude — and they 
walked out together twice weekly — without drifting 
back, so Froude tells us, into a pathetic cry of sor- 
row over things that were irreparable, and giving 
expression to a repentance that was deep and pas- 
sionate. One would have thought that it would have 
been a relief to him to have made a clean breast 
of it to his father confessor. A repentance that 
consists of Pharisaical generalities, and does not 
condescend to particulars, is not of the noble type 
which Froude affirms Carlyle's to have been ; and it 
seems probable, therefore, that Froude's approach to 
Carlyle on the Ashburton affair must be put down 
amongst the imaginary conversations, more especially 
as with others, Carlyle never in his declining years 
manifested the slightest disinclination to talk about 
his friendship with the Ashburtons. Never did 
Carlyle, in conversation or in his writings, even in 
the gloomiest hours of his bereavement, express the 
least sorrow or contrition, or blame himself in con- 
nection with his intimacy with Lady Ashburton. 
He always refers to it with pride ; and there is, as 
Venables had justly remarked, " a total unconscious- 

55 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

ness of any questionable conduct or feeling" on his 
own part. " Least of all, does he regret the long- 
continued friendship which at one time caused her 
[Mrs. Carlyle] so much discontent." No one can 
read Carlyle 's moving note on the death of Lady 
Ashburton, without perceiving that he looked back 
on his friendship with her with no qualms of con- 
science : — " Monday, 4th May, 4>^ p.m., at Paris, died 
Lady Ashburton : a great and irreparable sorrow to 
me ; yet with some beautiful consolations in it, too." 
In annotating his wife's letters after her death, when 
in the full flood of his grief, and when remorse for 
any wrong done to her, if, as Froude afifirms, it visited 
him, must have been tormenting his soul, he could 
thus write of the woman whom Froude points to as 
her rival in his affections. " The most queen-like 
woman I had ever known or seen. The honour of 
her constant regard had, for ten years back, been 
amongst my proudest and most valued possessions — 
lost now; gone — for ever gone! ... In no society, 
English or other, had I seen the equal or the second 
of this great lady that has gone ; by nature and by 
cxxXiuTQ facile princeps,s\\Q, I think, of all great ladies 
I have ever seen." In Mrs. Carlyle, a great change 
took place in her view of Lady Ashburton after that 
lady's death. She was then, in 1857, recovering in 
some measure from the morbid melancholy which 
was at its acme in 1856, and the scales fell from her 
eyes. Regarding Lady Ashburton's funeral, which 
Carlyle attended, she wrote, " All the men who used 
to compose a sort of Court for her were there in 
tearsr As to her first visit to the Grange after Lady 

S6 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

Ashburton's death, she wrote: "The same house- 
hold of visitors; the same elaborate apparatus for 
living; and the life of the whole thing gone out of it ! 
Acting a sort of Play of the Pasty with the principal 
Part suppressed, obliterated by the stern hand of 
Death." She actually accepted from Lord Ashbur- 
ton some of the belongings of his late wife, which she 
could scarcely have done had her feelings towards her 
continued as they were in 1856. " I wish you would 
thank Lord Ashburton for me," she wrote to her 
husband from Haddington ; " I couldn't say anything 
about his kindness in giving me those things which 
she had been in the habit of wearing ; I felt so sick 
and so like to cry, that I am afraid I seemed quite 
stupid and ungrateful to him." 

But if Froude hesitated to sound Carlyle on the 
Ashburton affair and could not in three years find 
time to interrogate Forster, there were, at the time 
Miss Jewsbury's version of it was communicated to 
him, various other ways of getting at the truth. Miss 
Mary Aitken, whom he at that time addressed in his 
letters as " My dear Mary," was living with her uncle, 
and had access to all his papers and could have helped 
him. Dr. John Carlyle, who knew more than any 
one else of what the married life of his brother and 
sister-in-law had been, was alive and could have settled 
the point. The second Lady Ashburton was alive, 
and could have resolved his difficulties. To not one 
of these did he apply. Not one of them is he able 
to quote. To none of Mrs. Carlyle 's friends at the 
time of the Ashburton affair, save Miss Jewsbury, 
did he apply for enlightenment. He buttoned up in 

57 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

his breast that lady's precious disclosure and reserved 
it iox post-mortem application. True, he says, " there 
are in existence, or there were, masses of extrava- 
gant letters of Carlyle's to the great lady as ecstatic 
as Don Quixote's to Dulcinea," but he does not say 
that he has ever seen these letters, or has derived 
his knowledge of their nature, from any one who 
has seen them. It ought to be a sufficient answer 
to Froude's statement to recall the fact that these 
letters passed, on Lady Ashburton's death, into the 
hands of her husband, who read them, and cannot 
have thought them offensive in any way, as he 
continued one of Carlyle's warmest friends until his 
life's end ; that on his death they were read by his 
widow Louisa, Lady Ashburton, who also maintained 
an uninterrupted friendship with the writer. A 
little while before Carlyle's death, Louisa, Lady Ash- 
burton, told Mrs. Alexander Carlyle that she had 
burnt, or was going to burn, the letters, that they 
were friendly, intimate letters, expressive of admira- 
tion, but in no way transgressing proper bounds. If 
in one of these letters, as Froude declares, Carlyle 
asked Lady Ashburton not to tell his wife of some 
visit he paid her, the circumstance is susceptible not 
merely of an innocent but of a laudable explanation, 
for during part of the Ashburton friendship, his wife 
was in her morbid jealousy, feverishly counting his 
visits to Bath House, and it might have been humane 
to conceal from her that he had dined there. 

But if Carlyle's letters to Lady Ashburton have 
been destroyed, Lady Ashburton's replies to them 
have been preserved. Carlyle said they were " dry 

58 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

as sticks," but they read now as simple, friendly, 
kindly epistles. In not one of them is there any 
chiding of the Quixotic exuberance of the correspon- 
dent, which Froude has affirmed ; in not one is there 
a trace of the imperious mistress to whom Carlyle was 
a passing amusement and a slave, as Froude has 
phrased it, going far beyond even the transcendental 
Miss Jewsbury, who is obliged to admit that any 
other wife than Mrs. Carlyle " would have laughed at 
Mr. Carlyle's bewitchment with Lady Ashburton." 
Froude insinuated that Carlyle was extravagantly 
deluded, and having drawn the contrast that Lady 
Ashburton was a great lady of the world, while 
" Carlyle with all his genius had the manners to the 
last of an Annandale peasant," he recalls an instance 
of a peasant of genius who was weak enough to 
believe that a great lady who had taken an ad- 
miring interest in him, under analogous circum- 
stances, wanted to marry him. All this is designed 
to bring censure and derision on Carlyle, and all 
is wide of the mark. Carlyle was proud to call 
himself a peasant's son, but at the same time he 
had some good Scottish blood in his veins. Froude 
said, and he must have forgotten he had said it, 
" There was reason to believe that his own father 
was the actual representative of the Lords of Tor- 
thorwald ; and though he laughed when he spoke of 
it, he was clearly not displeased to know that he had 
noble blood in him. Rustic as he was in habits, dress 
and complexion, he had a knightly, chivalrous 
temperament, and fine natural courtesy; another 
sure sign of good breeding was his hand, which was 

59 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

small, perfectly shaped with long fine fingers and 
aristocratic finger nails." Venables, too, had said, 
" Notwithstanding his humble birth and rustic train- 
ing, he was keenly sensible to refinement of character 
and manner, and his own demeanour, tho' not 
conventional, was gracious and on fit occasions 
courtly." " My recollections of him are of almost 
uniform geniality and unfailing courtesy, tho' his 
cheerfulness might not be always undisturbed." 
Carlyle's manners of an Annandale peasant did not 
exclude him from the highest circles of London 
Society, and were assuredly no barrier to the friend- 
ship of that great Lady, Lady Ashburton, which was 
the utmost that, in her case, he ever aspired to. 

Stripped of the bedizenments that Froude and Miss 
Jewsbury have decked it in, the Ashburton affair is 
innocent and intelligible enough. It was Mrs. Car- 
lyle who made the acquaintance of Lady Ashburton 
in the first instance, when she formed a high opinion 
of her merits, describing her as the cleverest woman 
she had ever met, full of energy and sincerity, and 
with an excellent heart ; and it was she who urged 
Carlyle to accept the invitations which Lord Ashbur- 
ton, then Mr. Baring, gave him to his town and 
country houses, realising the advantages which might 
accrue from the acquaintance of the distinguished 
people that he met in these places. Carlyle was 
reserved and fastidious, and, had he declined the 
hand which the Ashburtons held out, London So- 
ciety of the better sort might long have remained 
closed to him. As the Ashburtons' guest, he met 

on equal terms men of rank and letters. Until the 

60 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

death of Sir Robert Peel, he probably entertained 
some hope of entering public or official life, and it 
was therefore desirable that he should become known 
to the leading politicians of the period. He took 
pleasure, too, legitimate pleasure, in the society of 
the brilliant and ambitious woman, so full of intellec- 
tual gaiety and satirical caprice, who presided over 
the Ashburton circle ; but that he was not, as Froude 
suggests, an interloper in that circle, paying clandes- 
tine homage to its mistress, let Lord Houghton, 
writing when both Lady Ashburton and Carlyle were 
dead, attest: "There could," he says, "be no better 
guarantee of these qualities (a joyous sincerity that 
no conventionalities, high or low, could restrain — a 
festive nature flowering through the artificial soil of 
elevated life) than the constant friendship that existed 
between Lady Ashburton and Carlyle — on her part 
one of filial respect and duteous admiration. The 
frequent presence of the great moralist of itself gave to 
the life of Bath House and The Grange a reality that 
made the most ordinary worldly component parts of 
it more human and worthy than elsewhere." 

That the friendship between Carlyle and Lady 
Ashburton never, on either side, drifted into extrava- 
gance, the character and conduct of Lord Ashburton 
are a sufficient guarantee. He had been engaged in 
vast monetary transactions in various parts of the 
world ; he had, as Mr. Bingham Baring, formed part 
of the Administration of Sir Robert Peel in 1835. 
He was a man of the noblest and purest purpose, 
with an entirely unselfish and truthful disposition, 
who, while manifesting lover-like delight and intellec- 

61 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

tual wonder in the display of his wife's genius and 
gaiety, maintained, we are told, a quiet authority 
over her in all the serious affairs of life. Is it likely 
that such a man would tolerate the slightest indiscre- 
tion on the part of his wife or of Carlyle, or permit, 
under his roof, anything calculated to cause just pain 
and anger to Mrs. Carlyle, for whom he felt the 
deepest regard ? 

In the early days the Ashburton friendship was a 
source of unalloyed pleasure to Mrs. Carlyle. The 
invitations to Bath House or Addiscombe invariably 
included her — unless in the case of a gentlemen's 
dinner-party — and she many times went alone, leaving 
her husband at home. But, as time went on, a 
certain jealousy of Lady Ashburton took possession 
of her mind. Lady Ashburton was as clever a con- 
versationalist as she, and had social prestige which 
gave her an advantage, and Mrs. Carlyle could not 
bear to be outshone. She first grudged Lady Ash- 
burton the attention and admiration she commanded 
in the general circle, she then grudged specifically 
the attention and admiration that Carlyle openly 
gave her, and finally she got it into her head that 
Carlyle had transferred to her the attention and 
admiration he once surrendered to his wife, and was 
in love with her. Then it was that in pathetic, some- 
times in bitter accents, she gave utterance to the 
morbid jealousy that consumed her — 

" Oh, waly, waly, love is bonnie 
A little while when it is new ; 
But when it's auld 
It waxeth cauld, 
And melts away like morning dew." 
62 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

" Beautiful verse, sweet and sad, like barley-sugar 
dissolved in tears. About the morning dew, how- 
ever! I would say, 'Goes out like ^candle snuff' 
would be a truer simile ; only that would not suit the 
rhyme." 

This last phase, however, morbid jealousy, only 
came when Mrs. Carlyle's health had given way, and 
was indeed but a sign of mental disorder. It may 
be laid down as axiomatic in medical psychology, 
that when a highly neurotic and childless woman, 
at a critical period of life, takes to morphia, morbid 
jealousy will develop itself. Mrs. Carlyle was highly 
neurotic and childless, and at a critical period of life 
she became addicted to morphia and other drugs, 
and ultimately developed morbid jealousy of her 
husband. No medical man can look carefully into 
her case without being convinced that she suffered 
from neurasthenia and climacteric melancholia, and 
that the piteous outcries of the Journal, which Froude, 
guided by Miss Jewsbury, accepted as proofs of her 
husband's perfidy and cruelty, were really but the 
empty ejaculations of her disordered feelings. Only 
the husband who has gone through the ordeal of 
living for years with a wife emotionally deranged, 
but intellectually clear as Mrs. Carlyle was, can 
realise what Carlyle must have endured, at a time, 
too, when he was struggling and almost sinking 
under a heavy task. His sympathetic gentleness 
and forbearance are beyond all praise. Froude hav- 
ing thrown off all constraint, now declares that Mrs. 
Carlyle was " ashamed and indignant at the unworthy 
position in which her husband was placing himself. 

63 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

Rinaldo in the bower of Armida or Hercules spin- 
ning silks for Omphale." It must have escaped his 
memory that he had formerly written " Carlyle's let- 
ters during all this period [the Ashburton affair 
period] are uniformly tender and affectionate, and 
in them was his true self, if she could but have 
allowed herself to see it." 

The Ashburton affair was truly, as Froude remarks, 
the cause of much heartburning and misery at Cheyne 
Row, but it was so only because Mrs. Carlyle's 
diseased fancies fastened upon it, as they would have 
fastened on something else had Carlyle broken with 
the Ashburtons altogether. Froude has wholly 
misunderstood it, has published abroad the midnight 
mutterings of a sick woman, and has based on them 
discreditable reflections on her long-suffering hus- 
band. That Carlyle took the correct view of his 
wife's condition is clear, for looking back on it in 
1866, he ascribed the dispiritment and unhappiness 
of his wife " chiefly to the deeper downbreak of her 
own poor health, which from this time [1856, the date 
of the Journal], as I 7iow see better, continued its 
advance upon the citadel or nervous system." 

But bad as in Froude 's sight the Ashburton affair 
was, something worse remained behind. Carlyle " had 
said in his Journal that there was a secret connected 
with him unknown to his closest friends," and without 
a knowledge of which no true biography was possible ; 
and so, when selected as his biographer, Froude set 
himself to find out this secret, which if unearthed must 
necessarily influence him in all he might say. He had 
no doubt from the first that it was connected with some 

64 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

moral delinquency, and how wildly awry he went in 
his reading of Carlyle's papers may be best shown 
by quoting the passage in the Journal, and the only 
passage, in which the so-called secret is referred to. 
It is dated 29th December, 1848, and runs as follows: 
" Darwin said to Jane, the other day in his quizzing- 
serious manner, 'Who will write Carlyle's 'Life'?' 
The word reported to me, set me thinking how 
impossible it was and would for ever remain, for any 
creature to write my 'Life'; the ^^z>/" elements of my 
little destiny have all along lain deep below view or 
surmise, and never will or can be known to any son 
of Adam. I would say to my biographer, if any fool 
undertook such a task, ' Forbear, poor fool ; let no 
life of me be written; let me and my bewildered 
wrestlings lie buried here, and be forgotten swiftly of 
all the world. If thou write, it will be mere delusions 
and hallucinations. The confused world never under- 
stood, nor will understand, me and my poor affairs; 
not even the persons nearest me could guess at them ; 
— nor was it found indispensable ; nor is it now, for 
any but an idle purpose, profitable, were it even 
possible. Silence, and go thy ways elsewhither.'" 
To the common man, to say nothing of the student 
of Carlyle's writings, but one interpretation of this 
is possible. It refers not to one secret but to many 
— to the bewildered wrestlings of the writer's soul 
with the mysteries of being, to those incommuni- 
cable stirrings that agitate the depths of every human 
heart. It is but a variant of what Carlyle has said 
many times in his books about the sacramental 
nature of life, and the barrier that must always shut 
5 ' 65 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

out one human being from another. But that would 
not do for Froude; he detected a personal secret 
in this passage, and determined to ferret it out. 
And help came to him in that daughter of Eve, 
Miss Jewsbury, who at once detected what Carlyle 
had said no son of Adam could find out, and made 
patent what he had thought not even the persons 
nearest him — therefore not even his wife — could 
guess at. Purely in the interests of frank biography, 
Miss Jewsbury, hearing that Froude was to write 
Carlyle 's life, hurried to him and disclosed that 
" Carlyle was one of those persons who ought never 
to have married," and, like a flower that perishes in 
the blossoming, Froude tells us, she died soon after. 
But of course, Froude is wrong, for, as a matter of 
fact, she survived seven years after her revelation. 
This unmarried lady went to Froude, who was not 
a medical man, and soiled the memory of the man 
towards whom she had professed undying gratitude, 
and Froude is not ashamed to say that she entered 
on " curious details." We need not suppose that in 
doing so she suffered from maidenly embarrassment, 
or was suffused with blushes, for we have it on Mrs. 
Carlyle's authority that she had herself allowed that 
she had " absolutely no sense of decency," and that 
her tendency towards the " unmentionable " was too 
strong to be stayed. She informed Froude that 
Carlyle's extraordinary temper, which as he grew 
older and more famous became more violent and 
overbearing, was a consequence of his organisation, 
that Mrs. Carlyle never forgave the injury done her 
in her marriage, and that her disappointed longing 

66 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

for children had been at the bottom of all their 
quarrels and unhappiness. 

" I have never been curious about family secrets," 
says Froude, " and have always, as a rule of my life, 
declined to listen to communications which were no 
business of mine," and yet he seems to have opened 
his ears widely to Miss Jewsbury's unpleasant family 
communication. That communication was made to 
him in 1873, and must have been always present to 
his mind while writing " The Life of Carlyle," and 
yet in that life he says, " I for myself concluded, 
though not till after long hesitation, that there should 
be no reserve, and therefore I have practised none." 
.... " To have been reticent would have implied 
that there was something to hide, and taking Carlyle 
all in all, there never was a man, I at least never 
knew one, whose conduct in life would better bear 
the fiercest light that could be thrown upon it." .... 
" There ought to be no mystery about Carlyle, and 
there is no occasion for mystery." And the man 
who penned these sentences in 1883 is he who wrote 
in 1887, " The worst of these faults [Carlyle 's faults] 
I have concealed hitherto," and who then and there 
placed on record, evidently with a view of its being 
ultimately uncovered to the public gaze, a mystery, 
which he had concealed, but which he believed had 
dominated and clouded the life of the man whose 
entirely candid biographer he professed himself to 
have been. 

Delicacy forbids that we should here discuss 
Froude's mystery or Miss Jewsbury's communica- 
tion. They have been fully examined in the pages 

67 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

of a medical journal, where alone they could be prop- 
erly considered, and we believe we may say they 
have been proved to have been the offspring of a 
prurient imagination. There is no truth in them. 
The evidence of their falsity is absolutely conclusive. 
The use made of them by Froude and his represen- 
tatives must be regarded as deplorable and a stain on 
English literature. There was no corroboration of 
Miss Jewsbury's statement. Not one line or word 
could she point to in all her confidential correspond- 
ence with Mrs. Carlyle, extending over a quarter of 
a century, or in Mrs. Carlyle's secret Journal and 
most retired communings with herself, when her 
bitterness against her husband was at its height, 
giving the faintest colour to the disclosure. It 
depended entirely on her recollection of alleged 
conversations with Mrs. Carlyle, to support which 
she could produce no collateral evidence; and yet 
without the smallest confirmation Froude accepted 
her wild and whirling words. He did not think it 
necessary to apply any tests, although he regarded 
the statement, not as a bit of idle talk, but as of vital 
moment, and allowed it to tincture and control his 
whole biography of Carlyle. The substance of it 
has been concealed until now, but emanations from 
it have been for years floating about. Rumour has 
given currency to Miss Jewsbury's slander, for slander 
it must be called ; as, rightly or wrongly, a certain 
degree of opprobrium does attach to the organisation 
Miss Jewsbury ascribed to Carlyle, with which certain 
intellectual disabilities are often associated. 

All readers of Carlyle must allow that his writings 

68 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

are characterised by splendid virility, and that he 
was every inch a man. The Carlyles lived on a 
higher plane than Froude conceived. Their married 
life of forty years' duration was essentially beautiful. 
It was not blessed with offspring. It was chequered, 
as all married lives are, with cares, anxieties and 
sorrows, it was rufHed by angry breezes, it was 
shadowed by sickness, which at one time gathered 
into a thunder-cloud, but it was irradiated through- 
out by the pure white light of wholesome human 
love. 

It seems almost a profanation to quote from the 
letters which passed between Carlyle and Jane Welsh 
during their courtship, and between Carlyle and his 
wife during the early years of their married life, but 
it is to be remembered that these are already on 
record, having been published by Froude, and they 
certainly throw a pleasing light on the relations 
which subsisted between them. 

During their engagement Jane Welsh wrote to 
Carlyle, after a visit to Hoddam Hill, " I love you, 
tenderly, devotedly." " I am yours, oh ! that you 
knew how wholly yours," in response to some ardent 
expression of Carlyle 's, whose anticipations of matri- 
mony were normal enough. " Here," he wrote from 
Scotsbrig, "are two swallows in the corner of my 
window, that have taken a house this summer ; and 
in spite of drought and bad crops are bringing up a 
family together with the highest contentment and 
unity of soul. Surely, surely Jane Welsh and Thomas 
Carlyle here as they stand have in them conjunctly 
the wisdom of many swallows. Let them exercise 

69 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

it then, in God's name, and live happy as these birds 
of passage are doing." Mrs. Carlyle's letters after 
the marriage, and indeed at every period of their 
married life, bear no trace of disappointment. Six 
weeks after her marriage she wrote to her mother-in- 
law, " We are really very happy ; and when he falls 
upon some work we shall be still happier. Indeed, 
I should be very stupid or very thankless, if I did 
not congratulate myself every hour of the day on 
the lot which it has pleased Providence to assign to 
me. My husband is so kind, in all respects after my 
own heart ! " 

During one of her first separations from him, when 
visiting her mother at Templand, she addresses him, 
" Kindest and dearest of husbands. Are you thinking 
you are never to see my sweet face any more ? . . . 
I wish I were back to see it and to give you a kiss 
for every moment I have been absent. . . . Dearest, 
I do love you. God bless you, my Darling. — Ever ! 
ever your true Wife." 

Again she wrote from Templand within two years 
of their marriage, " Goody, Goody, dear Goody. You 
said you would weary, and I do hope in my heart 
you are wearying. It will be so sweet to make it 
all up to you in kisses when I return. You will 
take me and hear all my bits of experiences, and your 
heart will beat when you find how I have longed to 
return to you." Are these the utterances of an 
amatively disappointed and mortified wife? 

Carlyle's letters to his wife are not less tenderly 
and naturally affectionate than hers to him. His 
first letter to her, when they were parted for the first 

70 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

time since their marriage, is dated i6th April, 1827, 
and begins thus : " Dearest Wife, — What strange 
magic is in that word, now that for the first time I 
write it to you. I promised that I would think of you 
sometimes ; which truly I have done many times, or 
rather all times, with a singular feeling of astonish- 
ment, as if a new light had risen on me since we 
parted, as if, until now, I had never known how 
precious my own dearest little Goody was to me, and 
what a real angel of a creature she was. I could bet 
a sovereign that you love me twice as well as ever 
you did ; for experience in this matter has given me 
insight. Would I were back to you, and my own 
Jane's heart would beat against her husband's." 
Froude prints Mrs. Carlyle's reply to the fore- 
going, but with characteristic alterations. He puts 
a cold "you" where Mrs. Carlyle has written 
" Darling " ; he puts " my husband " where Mrs. 
Carlyle has written " my dearest husband " ; and he 
omits the amatory ending, " God keep you, my 
dear good husband. Write and love me. Your 
own Goody." 

Another letter in early wedlock runs thus: " Not 
unlike what the drop of water from Lazarus's finger 
might have been to Dives in the flame was my dear- 
est Goody's letter to her Husband yesterday after- 
noon. . . . No, I do not love you in the least; only 
a little sympathy and admiration, and a certain esteem,^ 
nothing more ! — O my dear, best wee woman ! — But 
I will not say a word of all this till I whisper it in 
your ear with my arms round you." Is this the lan- 
guage of an impotent man addressing the woman to 

n 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

whom he has done a grievous wrong which she is 
bitterly resenting? 

Miss Ann Carlyle Aitken and Miss Margaret Car- 
lyle Aitken, now Hving in Dumfries, recall that, twice 
whilst at Craigenputtock, Mrs. Carlyle consulted 
their mother, the late Mrs. Aitken, about her mater- 
nal hopes, which alas ! came to nought ; and the late 
Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, when, on her aunt's death, 
she became her uncle's companion, was much touched 
to find in a drawer at Cheyne Row a little bundle 
of baby clothes made by Mrs. Carlyle 's own hands. 
This reminds us of Carlyle 's pathetic and significant 
allusion in the " Reminiscences " to the child's chair 
which his wife had herself used when young, and 
kept in her house with feelings no woman can fail to 
understand. " Her little bit of a first chair, its wee, 
wee arms, etc., visible to me in the closet at this 
moment, is still here and always was ; I have looked at 
it hundreds of times, from of old with many thoughts. 
No daughter or son of hers was to sit there ; so it 
had been appointed us, my Darling. I have no Book 
thousandth-part so beautiful as Thou ; but these were 
our only 'Children,' — and in a true sense they were 
verily ours ; and will perhaps live some time in the 
world, after we are both gone ; — and be of no dam- 
age to the poor brute chaos of a world, let us hope ! 
The Will of the Supreme shall be accomplished. 
Amenl' 

In the epitaph in Haddington Churchyard Jane 

Welsh is described, not as the faithful companion, but 

as " the spouse of Thomas Carlyle," " for forty years 

the true and ever-loving helpmate of her husband." 

72 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

Carlyle was a true man, no hypocrite or slave to 
convention, and he would not have used these words 
had Jane Welsh never been his spouse in any true 
sense, but his ill-used thrall who had been often on 
the point of leaving him. 

To any one with a spark of knowledge of human 
nature, Carlyle 's long and passionate mourning for 
his wife, his lonesome visits to her grave, where he 
knelt down and reverently kissed the green mound, 
must betoken a tenderer tie than mere platonic 
fellowship. 

A word may be said on one or two of the deduc- 
tions drawn by Froude from Miss Jewsbury's extraor- 
dinary statement. We are assured that] it was Mrs. 
Carlyle's disappointed longing for children that was 
at the bottom of all the domestic unhappiness and 
quarrels at Cheyne Row. How much exaggerated 
by Froude that unhappiness and these quarrels were 
has been already shown. How little Mrs. Carlyle's 
unfulfilled maternal hopes had to do with any asperi- 
ties that did exist, may now be indicated merely to 
illustrate Froude's incomprehension of Mrs. Carlyle's 
character. A child at Cheyne Row would have been 
an unspeakable boon and blessing, but Mrs. Carlyle 
had probably during the greater part of her life there 
no very strong desire for its arrival. In the early 
days at Craigenputtock " she had the passions of her 
kind," and longed for a child, but it was only when 
they made up their minds that there was not likely 
to be a family, that the Carlyles determined to re- 
move to London, and there Mrs. Carlyle soon became 
involved in ambitious projects, with the fulfilment of 

n 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

which the claims of the nursery must have interfered. 
Like some of the fashionable women of the day, she 
became more alive to the drawbacks than to the 
pleasures of motherhood. She had no great liking 
for children, and there is not to be found in her writ- 
ings a single affectionate reference to them. She 
calls them "wersh gorbs" and "insipid offsprings," 
and, writing to Mrs. Russell, she exclaimed, " Gra- 
cious! what a luck I had no daughters to guide." 
There is no reason to suppose that the want of chil- 
dren seriously ruffled Mrs. Carlyle's equanimity at 
Cheyne Row. 

Three times over Froude informs us that Mrs. 
Carlyle had resolved to leave her husband. " One 
had heard that she had often thought of leaving 
Carlyle, and as if she had a right to leave him if she 
pleased." " She had often resolved to leave Carlyle. 
He, of course, always admitted that she was at liberty 
to go if she pleased." " She had definitely made up 
her mind to go away, and even to marry another 
person." But, in order to marry another person, she 
would have had to divorce Carlyle, or obtain a decree 
of nullity of marriage ; and with his inimitable incon- 
sistency, a little further on, Froude says, " She would 
not make a scandal by revealing the truth and dis- 
solving the marriage, but once, at least, she had 
resolved to put herself out of the way altogether." 
Which is it to be, desertion, divorce or suicide? 
Froude cannot be allowed to juggle with all three, 
Mrs. Carlyle contemplated suicide even before her 
marriage, and many times after it, but that she had 
ever, as is alleged by Froude, made up her mind to 

74 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

go to Scotland by sea and drop off the stern of the 
steamer cannot be believed. It is one of Geraldine 
Jewsbury's stories, and is, of course, apocryphal. 
Mrs. Carlyle had plenty of morphia and henbane and 
prussic acid and chloroform, and could have made 
away with herself, without going to sea, of which she 
had always a horror. It was Froude's lack of hu- 
mour, a saving quality — the essence of which is sen- 
sibility; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of 
existence — of which he was entirely destitute, that 
led him into the ridiculous canard about Mrs. Carlyle 
running away and marrying another person ; the sole 
discoverable origin of it being this passage in one of 
her letters to Mrs. Russell : " Do be so good as to 
give Mr. Dobbie an emphatic kiss from me, for if 
Mr. C. become unendurable with his eternal Fred- 
erick, I intend running away with Mr. Dobbie to the 
backwoods, or wherever he likes." If Froude had 
made a little inquiry, he would have discovered that 
Mr. Dobbie was Mrs. Russell's father, a reverend 
gentleman then in his eightieth year. It was proba- 
bly lack of knowledge that betrayed Froude into his 
accusation against Carlyle of cruelty, in retorting to 
his wife, when she told him how near leaving him 
she had been, *"' Well, I do not know that I should 
have missed you ; I was very busy just then with my 
Cromwell," words which hurt her, he says, more than 
any others she had ever heard from him. But if we 
are to believe all Froude has told us, these words 
were mild, compared with his many savage onslaughts 
on her, and the truth seems to be that Froude has 
applied to Carlyle and his wife a story which Carlyle 

75 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

used to tell, and at which his wife laughed merrily. 
It was the story of a North of England farmer, whose 
wife, with whom he had had a tiff, left him and went 
back to her parents, but soon tired of the separation 
and returned home. Meeting her husband, she ad- 
dressed him thus: " I'se back again, thou sees ! " to 
which her husband replied, "Back again? I never 
kenned thou was away ! " 

That Mrs. Carlyle, whatever she may have said in 
her tempestuous moods, ever seriously harboured 
the idea of leaving her husband, no one who has 
conned her letters will believe. In 1844, before there 
was any Lady Ashburton on the scene, she wrote to 
him : " I am always wondering since I came here how 
I can even in my angriest moods talk about leaving 
you for good and all; for to be sure, if I were to 
leave you to-day on that principle, I should need 
absolutely to go back to-morrow to see how you 
were taking it." All the letters written both by 
Carlyle and his wife during their temporary sep- 
arations teem with affectionate anticipations of re- 
union. 

Froude's third specific charge against Carlyle is 
that he used personal violence to his wife. Carlyle, 
he tells us, when examining his wife's papers after 
her death, " found a remembrance in her Diary of 
the blue marks which in a fit of passion he had once 
inflicted on her arms. . . . As soon as he could col- 
lect himself he put together a memoir of her, in 
which with deliberate courage he inserted the in- 
criminating passages (by me omitted) of her Diary, 

the note of the blue marks among them, and he 

76 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

added an injunction of his own that however stern 
and tragic that record might be, it was never to be 
destroyed." 

Now all this is fiction — a tissue of ingeniously con- 
cocted fiction, and we can only suppose that in writ- 
ing it Froude anticipated that when his "Apologia" 
was given to the v^^orld there would be no one who 
would care to take the trouble to examine too mi- 
nutely into the foundation of his plausible tale. He 
conveys to us, that it was from Carlyle he derived his 
knowledge that the two blue marks were due to his 
violence, and yet two years later we find him asking 
an explanation of them from Miss Jewsbury, who of 
course remembered them only too well, " The marks 
were made by personal violence," said she. 

It is in itself suspicious that Froude does not quote 
the exact words of the incriminating passage in the 
Diary, We are able to supply this omission. This 
was the entry. " 26th June. Nothing to record to- 
day but two blue marks on the wrist." That is all. 
The previous entry for 24th June records a visit to 
Kensington Palace to see the old German pictures, 
and a family party at Lady Charlotte Portal's at 
which she was accompanied by Mr. Carlyle. The 
following entry for June 27th records a visit to 
Hampstead with Miss Jewsbury and a dinner at the 
" Spaniards." It will be observed that Mrs. Carlyle 
does not say that the blue marks on her wrist {wrist, 
be it noted, not '' armsl' as Froude has it, an impor- 
tant distinction), were caused by her husband or give 
any hint as to how they came there. And that Car- 
lyle, after an interval of ten years, should, on reading 

^^ 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

the Diary, have connected the entry with personal 
violence of his own and have made confession to 
Froude, and insisted on the retention of the incrimi- 
nating passage, is incredible. 

The Memoir which Froude says as soon as he could 
collect himself, he put together, was undertaken on 
the occasion of his reading Miss Jewsbury's " little 
book of myths," reminiscent of Mrs. Carlyle. As 
soon as the book was sent to him by Miss Jewsbury, 
he began to jot down, on its vacant leaves, his cor- 
rections of the stories, and when the book was filled 
he took another note book, which had been his 
wife's, and went on writing down what memories 
recurred to him of her parentage, girlhood, and life 
beside him. These two books constitute the manu- 
script of the Memoir, — " Jane Welsh Carlyle," which 
was part of the " Letters and Memorials," but which 
Froude, on his own authority, published as part of 
the " Reminiscences." The so-called incriminating 
passage was contained in the later portion of Mrs. 
Carlyle's Journal, which alone had been discovered 
at the time, and Carlyle introduced the whole of this 
bodily into the above-mentioned note book which 
had been his wife's, at the proper place in point of 
time. He added no injunction as to the incriminat- 
ing passage, but he prefaced Mrs. Carlyle's Journal 
with these w^ords: "But in 1856" [it was in 1856 
that the Journal with the so-called incriminating pas- 
sage was written], "owing to many circumstances — 
my engrossment otherwise (sunk in Frederick, in, 
etc., etc., far less exclusively, very far less than she 
supposed, poor soul !) ; — and owing chiefly, one may 

78 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

fancy, to the deeper down-break of her own poor 
health, which from this time, as I now see better, 
continued its advance upon the citadel, or nervous 
system, and intrinsically grew worse: — in 1856, too 
evidently, to whatever owing, my Darling was ex- 
tremely miserable! Of that year there is a bit of 
private diary, by chance left unburnt ; found by me 
since her death, and not to be destroyed, however 
tragical and sternly sad are parts of it. She had 
written, I sometimes knew (though she would never 
show to me or to mortal any word of them) , at differ- 
ent times, various bits of diary ; and was even at one 

time upon a kind of autobiography (had not stept 

into it with swine's foot, most intrusively, though 
without ill intention — finding it unlocked one day ; — 
and produced thereby an instantaneous burning of 
it ; and of all like it which existed at that time). Cer- 
tain enough, she wrote various bits of diary and 
private record, unknown to me; but never anything 
so sore, down-hearted, harshly distressed and sad as 
this (right sure am I!), — which alone remains as 
specimen." 

Now what is there here about " blue marks," " in- 
criminating passage," or " bit of passion " .? The 
words " tragical and sternly sad " are not applied by 
Carlyle to any incriminating passage but to the whole 
Journal, or parts of it, and the real significance of the 
Journal, as an outcome of nervous and mental disor- 
der, he had been compelled to recognise. He puts 
it as euphemistically as possible, but he cannot shut 
his eyes to the fact that his wife was morbidly mel- 
ancholic at the time. In June, 1856, she was labour- 

79 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

ing under profound despondency, and Froude, in his 
letter of intimidation of April 20th, 1886, in which he 
threatened Mrs. Alexander Carlyle with the publica- 
tion of " the blue marks," adds: " I know also that on 
this or on some other similar occasion Mrs. Carlyle 
had made up her mind to destroy herself." He 
knew very well — for in violation of decent reserve he 
had himself published the fact — that Mrs. Carlyle 
had on several occasions made up her mind to de- 
stroy herself : he knew very well that she was at this 
time taking morphia, which is a deliriant as well as 
an anodyne and soporific: he knew very well that 
she passed through what her husband called " a des- 
perate time " and Dr. Blakiston " hysterical mania," 
and yet it never occurred to him that two blue marks 
on the wrist might have come in the humane exer- 
cise of necessary restraint. Could " two blue marks 
on the wrist" suggest an assault to any one but 
Froude ? What warrant had he for saying that Car- 
lyle caused them in any way ? Mrs. Carlyle does not 
say so. Nowhere in her letters or diaries is there the 
remotest suggestion of such a thing. She under- 
stood afterwards how ill she had been at this time, 
for exactly a month after the surmised assault we find 
her writing to Mrs. Russell: " I was very poorly in- 
deed when I left home [in the middle of July], but I 
am quite another creature; on the top of this Hill 
with the sharp Fife breezes about me." At the same 
time, July 29th, she is writing to her brutal assailant, 
her husband : " Of course I am sad at times, at all 
times sad as death, but that I am used to and don't 
mind. And as for the sickness, it is quite gone since 

80 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

the morning I left Chelsea." That the two blue 
marks on the wrist business cannot have had any 
very serious consequences may be inferred from the 
facts that within one week of the record of them she 
gave sitting for her portrait, went through the ordeal 
of the dentist's chair, and attended " the most mag- 
nificent ball of the season." It may indeed well be 
doubted, whether the blue marks had any such sig- 
nificance as the melodramatic Froude has attributed 
to them, and ought not to be regarded in a comic 
rather than a tragic light. Mrs. Carlyle has else- 
where chronicled similar marks on Carlyle's skin 
caused by the operations of her bete 7ioir, the bug, if 
an insect may be so designated, which, in spite of 
her vigilance, several times invaded 5, Cheyne Row, 
and her hunts after which she has described with the 
exciting realism of one of her favourite novelists, 
Fenimore Cooper, and the wrist is a favourite point 
of attack of the Cimex Lectularius. 

Let us take the tale of the blue marks seriously, 
however, and put the worst possible construction on 
Mrs. Carlyle's words, supposing that her husband in 
some domestic altercation had roughly grasped her 
wrist, thus causing two blue marks on her sensitive 
and very bruisable skin. It is believable that such 
an incident — not unknown even in well-regulated 
families — would rankle in his mind, after an interval 
of ten years, during the whole of which his wife had 
given copious expression of her gratitude for his un- 
remitting gentleness and loving-kindness, and fill his 
declining days with remorse as Froude affirms? Is 

it believable that if, as Froude asserts, it was this 
6 81 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

incident, that in the after years, caused him so much 
pain, he would not have mentioned it amongst all 
the unsparing self-reproaches in which he indulged? 
Never once does he refer to it in his most racking 
retrospective writings. Never once did he mention 
it to his niece, who was his confidant in his darkest 
days. According to Froude, Carlyle's nobility of 
nature was conspicuously exhibited in the penitential 
reparation he resolved to make to his wife's memory. 
But was this man, with his hatred of hypocrisy and 
fearless sincerity, likely to content himself with half 
an expiation ? Was he likely to parade his peccadil- 
los and hide away his mortal sins? Is it not certain 
that if he had been guilty of any act of violence 
towards his wife, he would have repented in dust and 
ashes and confessed his fault ? The fact that, while 
seizing on every allusion in his wife's writings in 
connection with which he could upbraid himself, he 
passed over the entry as to the " two blue marks on 
the wrist" without comment, is a sufficient proof 
that it had no sinister meaning for him, and that 
all that Froude says about it must have been 
drawn from his imaginary conversations. The 
words that spring to one's pen on reviewing this 
attempt to brand Carlyle as a brute are best left un- 
written. 

As brutality and selfishness were, according to 
Froude, the keynotes of Carlyle's youth and prime, 
remorse gave the tonality to his declining years. 
When his wife was no more, says his gentle biogra- 
pher, he saw " that he had made her entirely miser- 
able ; that she had sacrificed her life to him ; and that 

82 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

he had made her a wretched return for her devotion. 
. . . For the next four years I never walked with 
him without his recurring to a subject which was 
never absent from his mind. His conversation, how- 
ever it opened, always drifted back into a pathetic 
cry of sorrow over things which were now irrepar- 
able." He suffered " an agony of remorse for a long 
series of faults which now for the first time he saw in 
their true light." All which shows that Froude did 
not understand the meaning of the word remorse as 
employed by Carlyle, and was incapable of entering 
into his feelings. " Between the Carlyles and Mr. 
Froude," as Mr. Augustine Birrell justly observes, 
" there flowed both Tweed and Trent, and the his- 
tory of the whole world." But Froude, unconscious 
of this, tried to make his shallow notions the plum- 
met of a nature infinitely deeper than his own. It 
can be demonstrated beyond dispute, that what 
Froude called remorse was simply poignant grief, in 
the guise it so often assumes, in the fine-fibred and 
magnanimous. Carlyle was not maddened by the 
stings of conscience, but borne down by sorrow, on 
the clouds of which he saw reflected, from time to 
time, huge Brocken spectres of even his minutest 
faults and failings. He nursed his sorrow to the last 
and seemed to say : " Assuagement, in this world there 
is none for me. Obliteration I would not have. My 
grief is my only comfort." Death is a mighty alche- 
mist. It transmutes much. On the erring woman 
it leaves " only the beautiful." It makes instruments 
with which to scourge us, not only of our pleasant 
vices, but of our paltry neglects and trivial trespasses. 

83 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

When it bereaves the aged, golden memories are 
converted into leaden regrets. 

Carlyle constantly used the word remorse some- 
what indiscriminately, sometimes in the sense of com- 
passionate regret, sometimes of mere vexation. He 
had " remorse," as he calls it, when visiting the grave 
of his mother, to whom he had been the kindest and 
most devoted of sons, when he did not succeed 
as well as he had expected in a lecture, and when 
Froude came in and interrupted his studies. In the 
case of his wife his remorse hinged on his having failed 
adequately to estimate her sufferings and on having 
bored her with his " Frederick." " Oh, I was blind 
not to see how brittle was the thread of noble celes- 
tial (almost more than terrestrial) life; how much it 
was all in all to me, and how impossible it should be 
left with me." " I had at last conquered Mollwitz, 
saw it all clear ahead and round me, and took to tell- 
ing her stories about it, in my poor bit of joy, night 
after night. I recollect she answered little, though 
kindly always. Privately, she at that time felt con- 
vinced she was dying: — dark winter, and such the 
weight of misery, and utter decay of strength ; — and 
night after night, my theme to her was Mollwitz / 
This she owned to me, within the last year or two ; — 
which how could I listen to without shame and 
abasement ? " And this was the sort of thing poured 
forth to Froude, " shame and abasement," for pros- 
ing about Mollwitz, and Froude, catching at the 
shame and abasement, and dropping the Mollwitz, 
turned it, in his crooked imagination, into deep and 
passionate repentance for heinous offences against 

84 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

his wife. The whole thing would be ludicrous, if it 
were not so shocking. There is not to be found, in 
all Carlyle's writings, after the death of his wife, 
when he was probing his heart and memory to their 
depths, any specific instance of an offence against 
her more heinous than his refusal to shake hands 
with the dressmaker at Madam Elise's when she 
desired him to do so: this "cruelty" he afterwards 
called it. Mrs. Carlyle had caught from her husband 
the exaggerative use of the word "remorse," for a 
lady writer in " Blackwood," who has recorded her 
reminiscences, says that when she had upset a work- 
basket and was rather profuse in her apologies Mrs. 
Carlyle twitted her with her " delicate remorses." 

It was Carlyle's septuagenarian remorse that first 
endeared him to Froude. Up till then, although he 
had been for years his most obsequious follower, and 
a constant guest at his fireside, he had never liked 
him, he admits. But now it was possible, not merely 
to admire but to love him. His sin had found him 
out; he repented and resolved to make an atone- 
ment, which was to consist in the publication after 
his death of a full catalogue of his misdeeds. Froude 
hailed this as " an expiation so frank and so complete 
that it washed the stain away," and felt honoured in 
being appointed Lord High Executioner. He felt 
that Carlyle's " character never could be put fairly 
and honestly among the records of the great men to 
whom he belonged unless the faults were confessed 
and absolution granted on the only fitting terms." 
The confession was to be made to the British public, 
in book form, but by whom the absolution was to be 

85 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

granted and on what fitting terms are not made clear. 
To most men it will seem that the line of conduct 
which Froude attributes to Carlyle and which was, 
in his estimation noble, was abject and cowardly. 
Penitence when sincere is praiseworthy, but it should 
be indulged in in silence and solitude, and not pro- 
claimed in lamentations, in the highway. Repara- 
tion, where practicable, is its sweetest fruit, but it can 
scarcely be held to include an apology to the injured 
person who is dead, tendered in the obituary notice 
of the transgressor. If Carlyle had felt that any 
public acknowledgment of his ill-treatment of his wife 
was required of him, it would have been made while 
he was still alive to bear the brunt of just condemna- 
tion, and not delayed till he was beyond the reach of 
censure in Ecclefechan kirk-yard. He was honest 
and manly and never cringed before his fellow-men, 
and to suppose him capable of a craven subterfuge, 
by way of expiation, is to reveal a radical misconcep- 
tion of his character. His pusillanimous resolve, 
that the grave faults with their miserable conse- 
quences which he had been ceaselessly bemoaning 
for fifteen years, should be made known when he was 
gone earned him Froude's "love." Had he ever 
formed such a resolve it must have made him 
despised by all right-minded persons. 

In accepting the office of undertaker for Carlyle's 
good name and in promising to smother his tomb- 
stone with wormwood and rue, Froude felt that it 
was not unHkely he might incur " the resentment of 
relations." Did it ever occur to him what the 
nearest of relations might have had to say to him ? 

86 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

Edifying, indeed, would have been Mrs. Carlyle's 
expository notes on his proceedings had |]speech, out 
of the Silences, been conceded to her for just five min- 
utes. Her husband's reputation was the apple of her 
eye, her most precious possession, that which above 
all things she desired should remain untarnished. 
About a week before her death, when congratulating 
him on his Rectorial Address in Edinburgh, she 
wrote to him : " I must repeat what I have said before 
— that the best part of this success is the general feel- 
ing of personal goodwill that pervades all they say 
and write about you. Even ' Punch ' cuddles you, 
and purrs over you, as if you were his favourite son." 
How proud she was of him ! " I tore it open," she 
wrote [the telegram announcing the success of the 
Address], "and read, 'From John Tyndall.' (Oh, 
God bless John Tyndall in this world and the next ! ) 
*A perfect triumph! '" And strangely enough there 
was at this time an anticipatory glimpse of the evil 
that was in store. Three days before her death she 
read a " Memoir " of her husband attached to a 
pirated issue of his Rectorial Address which he had 
sent to her, and she thus wrote to him about it : " If 
you call that 'laudatory ' you must be easily pleased. 
I never read such stupid, vulgar janners. The last 
of calumnies that I should ever had expected to hear 
uttered about you was this of your going about ' fill- 
ing the laps of dirty children with comfits.' Idiot ! 
My half-pound of barley sugar made into such a 
legend ! The wretch has even failed to put the right 
number to the sketch of the house — ' No. 7 ! ' " De- 
cidedly the Memoir, with its inaccuracies, its legends. 

8; 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

its janners, was'an appropriate forerunner of Froude's 
" Life." 

The three specific charges against Carlyle which 
we have analysed and proved worthless, Froude 
spoke of as the secrets of Cheyne Row. They were 
divulged to him by Miss Jewsbury; but he found 
from anonymous letters that they were no secrets at 
all; and that Froude should have given heed to 
anonymous letters is only less surprising than that 
the anonymous miscreants should have taken the 
trouble to [apprise him of the covert nastiness of 
Cheyne Row, rather than any other of Carlyle's 
friends. And, indeed, Froude's attitude towards 
these secrets, as described by himself, is unintelligi- 
ble. They were secrets which were no secrets at all, 
and he painfully debated within himself whether 
he should conceal them. If he suppressed them he 
made his biography a mere panegyric. If he pub- 
lished them he might incur resentment. " What was 
I to make of them ? " he piteously exclaims. At one 
time he confesses he had drifted to "the cowardly 
conclusion " that he would suppress everything un- 
pleasant, dwelling " on the brightest and best in Car- 
lyle and passing hghtly over the rest," thus baulking 
his illustrious friend of that post-mortem atonement 
on which he had set his heart. At another time he 
felt that concealment would be wrong, that faults 
frankly confessed are frankly forgiven, that, as Carlyle 
himself had taught him, it is " the truth shall make 
you free " in biography as in everything else, and so 
he resolved to disburthen his friendly bosom of the 

perilous stuff that weighed upon his heart. 

88 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

Now, the frank biography is unquestionably de- 
sirable ; but even the frank biography has its limits, 
and has not hitherto been held to include details of 
physiological functions or stenographic records of 
every unguarded and hasty word. It should not 
pander to unworthy curiosity. In every human life 
there is a highest and a lowest which even the frank- 
est biography should leave untouched ; a Shechinah 
which should remain enshrined in cloud, a scullery 
which should be hidden from view. In ignoring this, 
and in laying bare, with shameless incontinence, the 
most sacred emotions and private details in the life 
of his dead friend, Froude has exposed himself to the 
full force of Tennyson's withering denunciation of 
those who traffic in posthumous tittle-tattle and defa- 
mation. 

" For now the Poet cannot die, 
Nor leave his music as of old, 
But round him ere he scarce be cold 
Begins the scandal and the cry : 

" * Proclaim the faults he would not show : 
Break lock and seal : betray the trust : 
Keep nothing sacred : 'tis but just 
The many -headed beast should know.' " 

But it is not only the too frank biography that in 
Froude's case is complained of, but the false and 
grisly biography, that misrepresents its subjects and 
perpetuates, if it does not originate, dishonouring 
false witness regarding him. " A well-written Life," 
said Carlyle, " is almost as rare as a well-spent one." 
Never was Life worse written than his own. 

89 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

Froude complains that in preparing for his biogra- 
phy of Carlyle he was much embarrassed by the 
vacillation of Carlyle himself, and in this connection it 
is requisite to examine his statements as to the bio- 
graphical material placed in his hands. It was in 
1 87 1, he says, that Carlyle, without a word of warn- 
ing, brought him his wife's letters and a copy of the 
Memoir of her which he had written, made him a 
gift of them, and asked him to publish them or not, 
as he thought fit, when he was gone ; and it seems 
highly probable that in this, as in so many other mat- 
ters Froude's memory played him false, for if Carlyle 
had made a gift of these papers to him in 187 1, it is 
remarkable that he should specifically bequeath them 
to him by will in 1873. Froude does not allege that 
these manuscripts were ever seen by Carlyle after 
he handed them to him, and yet they contain notes 
by Carlyle, dated 1873. It was in that year (1873), 
Froude alleges, that Carlyle sent him in a box a 
collection of letters, diaries, memoirs, miscellanies of 
endless sorts, with a request that he would undertake 
his biography, for which these were the materials, 
and yet in that very year Carlyle left by will to his 
brother John all his manuscripts, except the Letters 
and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, given to 
Froude, and directed that in all such matters he 
wished his brother John to be regarded as his second 
and surviving self. 

At the very moment when Froude represents Car- 
lyle as thrusting papers upon him, and insisting on 
his undertaking the unsought-for task of composing 
his biography, Carlyle wrote in his will : " Express 

90 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

biography of me I had really rather that there should 
be none." 

Froude stumbled over dates in this matter in an 
inexplicable way. It is in the highest degree un- 
likely that papers of any kind were put in his hands 
until 1873; and then it was that, after the making of 
the will, the Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh 
Carlyle, which were to Carlyle, in his bereaved state, 
" of endless value," were given to him in order that 
he might take "precious charge of them, and, to- 
gether with John Forster and Dr. John Carlyle," the 
other Executors, "make earnest survey" of them, 
and of the autobiographic notes attached to them, 
and decide whether they or any portion of them 
should be published. It was not until 1877 of the 
following years that the biographical materials, which 
Froude alleges were given to him in 1873, were sent 
to him, not by Carlyle, but by Miss Mary Aitken, to 
whom they were given in 1875, and who, at the re- 
quest of her uncle, gave the loan of them to Froude, 
for biographical purposes. After Carlyle's death 
Froude disputed the gift to Miss Mary Aitken in 
1875. He tried to discredit her statement by urging 
that she could only say that the manuscripts had 
been given to her by word of mouth, and had no 
writing to show, overlooking the fact that he was 
himself in exactly the same position, and that Car- 
lyle's commission to him to write his biography was 
by word of mouth, and that he had no writing to 
show for that or for any of his other proceedings in 
dealing with these papers. He had no credentials 
to exhibit. Whenever exception was taken to any 

91 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

step he took, he pleaded oral instructions from 
Carlyle. 

If the decision on this disputed point had had 
to be given, solely on the conflicting statements of 
Froude and Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, no one, looking 
into the matter, would have hesitated to give a 
verdict in favour of the latter. Froude's inaccuracy 
and reminiscent extravagances were proverbial. To 
Mrs. Alexander Carlyle a special gift was bequeathed 
in the codicil to Carlyle 's will "as a testimony of the 
trust I repose in her, and as a mark of my esteem for 
her honourable, veracious and faithful character, and 
a memorial of all the kind and ever faithful service 
she has done me." 

But the gift of the manuscripts in 1875 to Mrs. 

Alexander Carlyle did not rest on her unsupported 

recollection. They had been bequeathed by the will 

of 1873, together with the Furniture, plate, linen, 

china, books, prints, pictures and other effects in the 

house at Cheyne Row to Dr. John Carlyle. But in 

the codicil of 1878, Dr. John Carlyle, being then 

sick unto death, the Furniture, plate, linen, china, 

books, prints, pictures and other effects in the house, 

are left to his niece, Mary Carlyle Aitken, absolutely, 

while no mention is made of the manuscripts which 

in the will formed part of the bequest to Dr. John 

Carlyle. Why so .f* Because they had already been 

disposed of and given in 1875 to Mary Carlyle 

Aitken, who had been dealing with them. This gift 

of these manuscripts to her in 1875 was corroborated 

by Carlyle himself on several occasions, and was 

testified to by Mr. Alexander Carlyle, Mrs. Aitken, 

92 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

Miss Ann Aitken, Mr. Allingham, Mr. Friedmann, 
Mrs. Venturi and Mrs. Anstruther; and Mr. (now 
Lord Justice) Cozens- Hardy, with the whole case, on 
both sides, before him, said that there was "good 
ground for contending that the ownership of these 
documents was not vested in the Executors, but was 
vested in Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, to whom they 
were given in June, 1875." Froude's contention, 
therefore, in " My Relations with Carlyle," that the 
manuscripts for the biography were given to him by 
Carlyle in 1873, falls to the ground, and may be re- 
butted by what he has himself written. On the 23rd 
of September, 1879, he wrote to Carlyle: " I conclude 
from what your niece said in her last letter, that you 
are again in London. We return ourselves in three 
weeks. She implies that you wish me to proceed at 
once with the task [the biography] which you have 
imposed on me. So of course I will do so. I began 
it two years ago, but I found so many injunctions 
attached to the letters by yourself that there was 
nothing to be done until long after you had your- 
self gone." That letter was written in 1879, and if 
Froude began his biographic work two years pre- 
viously^ that would be in 1877, or exactly at the time 
when, according to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, the 
manuscripts were lent to him by her. Froude is 
once more wrong in stating that all the multifarious 
materials for the biography were sent to him at one 
time. The letters of Carlyle to his brother Alick 
were sent in instalments during 1878 and 1879, and 
in November, 1879, Mr. Alexander Carlyle himself 
carried a bundle of them to Froude's house. The 

93 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

letters to Dr. John Carlyle, the most voluminous and 
important of all, were returned to Chelsea by his 
executor, and were not delivered to Froude till some 
months after Dr. Carlyle 's death, which took place 
on 15th September, 1879. In " My Relations with 
Carlyle," Froude says distinctly that the materials 
for the biography were sent to him in 1873 in a box. 
In a letter to the Times on May 9th, 1881, he com- 
plained that these materials had been sent to him at 
intervals without inventory or numerical lists. 

It is hard to understand how Froude can bring 
himself to say that until Carlyle said to him a year 
before his death, " When you have done with these 
papers of mine, give them back to Mary," he had 
regarded them as his own. He was explicitly told 
when the first papers were lent to him in 1877 that 
when he had finished with them they were to be 
returned to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle. In February, 
1879, when driving with him, Carlyle spoke to Froude 
about the papers, and on coming home told his niece: 
" Froude perfectly understands that the papers are 
all yours, and will return them all to you. He has 
promised to do so." In February, 1880, Mrs. Alex- 
ander Carlyle accidentally discovered that Froude 
did not seem to consider himself bound by this con- 
dition, and at once wrote to remind him of it. On 
the same day on which he received the reminder, 
Froude replied : " I perfectly understood that all the 
papers were to be returned to you when I had done 
with them. Your Uncle, however, told me the other 
day that you were expecting them now, and that you 
thought I must have forgotten about them." Two 

94 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

days later (loth February, 1880) he wrote again to 
Mrs. Alexander Carlyle: " It has, however, long been 
settled that you were to have the entire collection 
when I had done with it. Even if nothing had been 
arranged about it, I should of course have replaced 
it in your hands." These admissions, made in Car- 
lyle's lifetime, put it beyond cavil that Froude, who, 
in " My Relations with Carlyle," tells us that until a 
year before Carlyle 's death, he had looked on these 
papers as his own, and had been empowered to burn 
them if he liked, was at that very time acknowledg- 
ing that it had been '' long settled'' that they were to 
be returned to Carlyle's niece and " replaced " in her 
hands. The power to burn could only have been 
conferred in respect of the Letters and Memorials of 
Jane Welsh Carlyle, which were undoubtedly his, 
and not in respect of papers, which were lent him by 
Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, to be employed in preparing 
the " Life," and which were, he admits, to be returned 
to her. Froude could only use a comparatively 
small portion of the mass of papers inadvisedly lent 
to him, and he could scarcely expect that his pro- 
jected " Life of Carlyle " was to be the last word on 
the subject. 

But still more unequivocal acknowledgments by 
Froude of Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's property in the 
manuscripts are forthcoming. He wrote to the 
Times on the 25th February, 1881, specifically cor- 
recting the misstatement he had previously made, 
claiming the papers as a gift from Carlyle, for in a 
letter to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle of the 23rd Febru- 
ary, 1881, he said: "As to the Times, I think I had 

95 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

better write a little note to Chinery (the Editor) to 
say that by 'gave ' I only meant 'gave in charge to 
make use of,' and that the MSS. belong to you." 
Accordingly in his Times letter of the 25th of 
February, 1881, he wrote: "I wish to add that 
in saying that Mr. Carlyle gave me these papers 
I did not mean that he gave them to me as my 
property, but that he entrusted me with the use of 
them. . . . The papers belong to his niece, Mrs. 
Alexander Carlyle, to whom he directed me to re- 
turn them." 

And yet Froude has the audacity — there is no 
other word for it — to say in " My Relations with 
Carlyle" in 1887 that it is still " an open question " 
whether the papers were his, forgetting that he has 
again and again privately and publicly acknowledged 
that they were not his. Carlyle had told him they 
were not his. He had been merely " entrusted with 
the use of them," as he himself said in his letter to 
the Times. 

Mrs. Alexander Carlyle had left Froude in undis- 
turbed possession of her papers until the publication 
of the " Reminiscences." Up to that time Froude 
was on terms of intimate friendship with her and her 
husband, and they never doubted that he would faith- 
fully discharge his trust. But the appearance of the 
"Reminiscences" was a shock to them, and what 
Froude calls "the hailstorm of unfavourable criti- 
cism " which the book provoked made them feel that 
it was incumbent on them to do something to protect 
their uncle's memory, and to prevent further dese- 
cration of it. The inclusion of the Jane Welsh 

96 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

Carlyle Memoir in the " Reminiscences," about which 
not a word had been said to them, convinced them 
that Froude would not be bound by Carlyle's direc- 
tions, and could not therefore be safely entrusted 
with the more momentous work of preparing the 
" Life." Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, who had not, as 
Froude insinuates, any sordid motives, but a single 
eye to her duty to her uncle and her family and to 
truth, suggested that Froude should have associated 
with him in his labours, which he described as ardu- 
ous and oppressive, two or three other friends of 
Carlyle, men of judgment and discretion, to be agreed 
on. This proposal Froude — intensely chagrined by 
the publication of Carlyle's prohibition on the publi- 
cation of the Jane Welsh Carlyle Memoir — strongly 
resented. On the 9th of May, 1 881, he wrote to the 
Times as follows : " The Memoir of the late Mrs. 
Carlyle and the collection of her letters made by Mr. 
Carlyle and partially prepared by him for publication, 
are my personal property, given to me to make such 
use of as might seem good to me. I am the sole 
judge what parts of them should or should not be 
printed, and neither Mrs. Alexander Carlyle nor any 
one else has a right to call in question the discretion 
which Mr. Carlyle left with me alone. These papers, 
which are mine, I shall keep. The Memoir is pub- 
lished, the letters w^ill be published. I decline to 
allow any person or persons, whether friends of Mr. 
Carlyle or not, to be associated with me in the dis- 
charge of a trust which belongs exclusively to myself. 
The remaining papers, which I was directed to re- 
turn to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle as soon as I had done 
7 97 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

with them, I will restore at once to any responsi- 
ble person whom she will empower to receive them 
from me. 

" I have reason to complain of the position in which 
I have been placed with respect to these MSS. They 
were sent to me at intervals, without inventory or 
even numerical list. I was told that the more I burnt 
of them the better, and they were for several years 
in my possession before I was even aware that they 
were not my own. Happily, I had destroyed none 
of them, and Mrs. Alexander Carlyle can have them 
all when she pleases." 

" The remaining papers which I was directed to 
returrt to MrS' Alexajtder Carlyle as soon as I had 
done with them^ I will restore at cynce to ajiy responsi- 
ble person whom she will empower to receive them 
from, me!' " Mrs. Alexander Carlyle can have them 
all when she pleases!' 

Here we have a voluntary, unequivocal, uncondi- 
tional offer, twice repeated in a letter to the Times. 
A responsible person, her solicitor, empowered by 
Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, applied to Froude for the 
papers the following day. Froude refused to give 
them up. No explanation was given. He had 
changed his mind. It has since been said, that 
Froude's co-executor. Sir James Stephen, objected to 
the delivery of the papers, on the ground of some 
shadowy claim that the residuary legatees might have 
upon them. That was an after-thought. Nothing 
was said about it at the time the delivery was refused. 
Froude's own subsequent explanation was that he 
was provoked into making the offer, and had been 

98 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

" worried into great impatience," but it was necessary 
to find some better reason than that for the non-fulfil- 
ment of a definite and deliberate offer made in the 
columns of the Times^ and so the co-executor and 
his objection came upon the scene. That this objec- 
tion was not valid may be gathered from the way in 
which Mr. Cozens-Hardy brushed aside any claim of 
the executors on these papers, and that it was not 
genuine may be inferred from the fact that the offer 
remained still unfulfilled, after Mrs. Alexander Car- 
lyle had undertaken to procure the assent of all the 
residuary legatees, or to provide the executors with 
an indemnity against any possible claim that might 
be made against the residuary estate. If the papers 
belonged to the executors on behalf of the residuary 
estate, one is constrained to ask how came it that Sir 
James Stephen, on behalf of Mr. Froude, was at this 
time offering Mrs. Alexander Carlyle the profits of 
the " Reminiscences," which in that case neither he 
nor Froude had a right to touch? How came it that 
Froude appropriated the profits of the " Life," which 
in that case, in part at least, ought to have gone to 
the residuary legatees ? 

Plain men with non-legal minds will perhaps raise 
their eyebrows a little when they read Sir James 
Stephen's defence of Froude's breach of promise. 
" You afterwards considered yourself entitled, and I 
entirely agreed with you, to refuse to carry out the 
intention thus expressed. It had no legal validity. 
It was a mere statement of your intention, and was 
at the most a voluntary promise founded on no con- 
sideration, made in a moment of irritation, and which 

:L.qFC.§ "^ 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

did not in any degree affect Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's 
position." At all events it was a promise to which 
Froude had called the world to bear witness, by 
publishing it in the Times, and Sir James Stephen's 
statement that his deliberate breach of it in no way 
affected Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's position is incor- 
rect. It caused her much suffering and distress, and 
as things turned out, although that consideration did 
not weigh with her at the time, it deprived her of a 
very large sum of money which went into Froude's 
pocket. If the papers had been returned to her she 
could have herself undertaken the Biography, as 
Froude had once said she was well able to do, or she 
could have arranged with some other literary man to 
write it, retaining such a share of the profits as she 
was fairly entitled to, seeing that all the materials 
were undeniably hers. Froude retained the papers 
and wrote the " Life," and all the profits of it, which 
were very large, were his. 

The fact remains that Froude deliberately broke 
his deliberate promise. The humiliating position in 
which he thus placed himself does not seem to have 
been improved by the excuses of his friends. 

The Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle 
were absolutely Froude's property, given and be- 
queathed to him to do his best and wisest with, and 
to publish when made ready for publication, after 
what delay, seven, ten years, he might in his discre- 
tion decide. The only questions that arose regard- 
ing them were whether they were not published 
prematurely and whether they were wisely edited. 
Instead of waiting for seven years after Carlyle's death 

100 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

— and most people will, we think, accept that as the 
plain^meaning of the Will, they were out within two 
years of that event, and " fit editing " there was none. 
" Forster," says Froude, " read both memoir and 
letters. To me he gave no opinion." His widow 
assured Mrs. Alexander Carlyle that Forster was 
altogether opposed to the publication of either Let- 
ters or Memoir, and there can be no question that 
Dr. Carlyle took the same view. But a much more 
serious question arose in regard to the Memoir that 
was attached to the Letters and Memorials, entitled 
" Jane Welsh Carlyle." This was written by Carlyle, 
not as an expiation, as Froude represents, but as a 
relief to his feelings in his most dejected moments, 
after his wife's death, and it was assuredly his most 
earnest wish that it should never see the light in 
any public sense, or go beyond a small circle of 
private friends. Could there be a prohibition against 
publication more solemn or binding than this, which 
in Carlyle 's handwriting was attached to the Me- 
moir? — 

" I still mainly mean to bum this Book before my 
own departure ; but feel that I shall always have a 
kind of grudge to do it, and an indolent excuse, 'Not 
yet; wait, any day that can be done ! ' — and that it is 
possible the thing may be left behind me, legible to 
interested ^mxm'wqt's,,— friends only, I will hope, and 
with worthy curiosity not un^ox'&v^ ! 

"In which event, I solemnly forbid them each and 
all, to publish this Bit of Writing as it stands here ; 
and warn them that without Jit editing no part of it 
should be printed (nor so far as I can order, shall 

lOI 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

ever be) ; and that the 'Jit editing ' of perhaps nine- 
tenths of it will, after I am gone, have become im- 
possible r 

Notwithstanding this stringent and impressive em- 
bargo, Froude published the Memoir within a month 
of Carlyle's death, torn from the Letters and Me- 
morials to which Carlyle had attached it, and included 
in the " Reminiscences," made up of papers on Car- 
lyle's father, Edward Irving, Lord Jeffrey, Southey 
and Wordsworth. The prohibition against publi- 
cation, which formed part of the Memoir, was 
suppressed, and would never have been heard of, had 
not Mrs. Alexander Carlyle discovered it and sent it 
to the Times. Froude then explained that the writ- 
ten prohibition, indited at a time when Carlyle was 
fully conscious of the character of his work, was sub- 
sequently cancelled by oral communications, when 
or where he did not say. This Mrs. Alexander 
Carlyle firmly denied. During the thirteen years she 
was her uncle's constant companion and amanuensis, 
she knew of the existence of this fragment, and often 
heard him speak of it, always in the sense that it 
should never be published, and she was astounded 
when she heard from Mr. Allingham that it was 
actually in print. Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's letter 
which appeared in the Times of May 5th, i88r, which 
Froude called "a passionate and angry challenge," 
was studiously moderate in tone, and was written 
because she thought it only right that people should 
know that her uncle had, when his mind was clear 
on the subject, forbidden the publication of the Jane 

Welsh Carlyle Memoir, which was the part of the 

102 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

" Reminiscences " which gave most offence. Froude's 
defence was : " My conviction is that he wished it to 
be published, though he would not himself order it." 
In another place on this very point, Froude says, 
" He [Carlyle] never gave me any order," so the 
responsibility was his. Froude took the plunge from 
which, he says, Carlyle shrank, but which, as a mat- 
ter of fact, he had absolutely declined. Even while 
asserting that injunction against publication had been 
withdrawn, Froude never ventured to say that Car- 
lyle had sanctioned the removal of the Memoir from 
the Letters and Memorials and its inclusion in the 
" Reminiscences," and the reason given for this trans- 
ference is remarkable. Froude removed the Jane 
Welsh Carlyle Memoir from the Letters and Memo- 
rials, and published it with the "Reminiscences" 
" because," he coolly tells us, " when the Letters ap- 
peared, the blame of much might be thrown on her." 
His object, therefore, was that people might blame 
Carlyle for what ought really to be laid to Mrs. Car- 
lyle 's charge. The proceeding was in every way an 
unjust one, for the Letters, or a fair selection of 
them, published along with the Jane Welsh Carlyle 
Memoir, would have relieved its gloom and prevented 
many wrong impressions, difficult to smooth away 
when once stamped in. 

Even had there been no prohibition on the publi- 
cation of the Jane Welsh Carlyle Memoir, its publi- 
cation and those of the other papers with which it 
was bound up, without fit editing, was a colossal mis- 
take. The papers are beautiful, but scattered through 

them are acrid and stinging things that Carlyle had, 

103 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

in his dyspeptic moods and incongruous way, said 
about his most eminent contemporaries and private 
friends. There is not one of us who would hke to 
see his or her private diaries and familiar epistles 
given to the world without fit editing. Froude took 
seriously, what were in Carlyle often mere manifes- 
tations of biliousness or only fantastic tropes. And 
even if he had Carlyle 's directions — which he 
assuredly had not — to publish his undress and un- 
premeditated asperities, he erred in doing so, for no 
man is entitled to depute to another the doing of 
that which is in itself wrong and ruthless. Over- 
statement was habitual with Carlyle, and his hard 
words not seldom concealed the tenderest senti- 
ments. Mrs. Gilchrist relates that once, when he 
had just been advocating the shooting of Irishmen 
who would not work, he was affected until the tears 
ran down his face, when Mrs. Carlyle read aloud the 
account of the execution of the Italian Burnelli; and 
that on another occasion he was caught lavishing 
endearments on the little dog Nero, the uselessness of 
whose existence he had been, a few minutes before, 
denouncing in unmeasured terms. He was some- 
times a rough-rinded but always a soft-hearted man. 
The " Reminiscences " was, Froude himself tells us, 
"received with a violence of censure for which he 
was wholly unprepared," but which was not to be 
wondered at. They presented an altogether unex- 
pected and intensely painful outline of Carlyle ; they 
wounded the feelings of many living persons, and 
they bore obvious traces of haste and carelessness on 
the part of the editor. They were printed in so slov- 

104 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

enly a manner as to obscure the sense. The punc- 
tuation, the use of capitals, parentheses, itahcs, char- 
acteristic of Carlyle's style, were entirely disregarded. 
Professor Charles Eliot Norton found that, in the 
first five pages of the printed text, there were more 
than a hundred and thirty corrections to be made of 
words, punctuation, capitals, quotation marks and 
such like, and these pages were not exceptional, and 
were printed from MS. written in 1832, when Car- 
lyle's hand-writing was at its best. For this blunder- 
ing, Froude has excused himself in " My Relations 
with Carlyle," by saying that Carlyle's manuscripts 
were harder to decipher than the worst manuscripts 
he had ever examined, and that he was often at a loss 
to know what particular words might be. But he 
had himself described Carlyle's manuscripts as " beau- 
tiful," and they are still in existence, and can be 
submitted to competent judges, who will assuredly 
pronounce them deserving of that description. They 
are clear, distinct and easily read, and in connection 
with Froude 's excuse, it is instructive to note that it 
is, in the printed text of Carlyle's latest writing, when 
his hand was shaky, which, Froude says, he had to 
work at with a magnifying-glass, that the fewest 
mistakes occur. But, as will be seen presently, the 
liberties that Froude took with Carlyle's manuscripts 
were not confined to literal or verbal inaccuracies, 
but included material alterations affecting meaning. 
It was not only in connection with the inclusion of 
the Jane Welsh Carlyle Memoir in the " Reminis- 
cences," and the flagrant errors that deface that 

work, that serious difficulties arose. The disposal of 

105 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

the profits of it gave rise to complications, which first 
came to the surface when arrangements for an Ameri- 
can edition had to be made. Froude's version of 
these compHcations has been cut out of the text of 
" My Relations with Carlyle," by the editors and rele- 
gated to the appendix, so that it may not interfere 
with the continuity of the narrative ; but, as it raises 
a question vitally affecting Froude's good faith and 
is really the introduction to an essential part of the 
case against him in relation to the Carlyle manu- 
scripts, we think it better to discuss it here. 

" A singular fatality," Froude observes, when ap- 
proaching the American negotiations, " has attended 
me from first to last in this business." That is quite 
true, but the fatality was in his own mind and meth- 
ods, and that it was so is clearly established by the 
fact that we find an American publisher with whom 
he had dealings bringing exactly the same accusa- 
tions against him which have been made by all those 
who have closely scrutinized his conduct and work 
in literary affairs in this country. Messrs. Harper 

and Brothers of New York (the Mr. of Froude's 

Essay, but we see no reason why their name should 
be concealed) have accused him of having, by giving 
Carlyle's " Reminiscences " to his own American pub- 
lishers, disregarded the usage which, in the absence 
of international copyright, has been found to be the 
fairest practicable arrangement, and is observed by 
all the leading publishers in America, under which 
is conceded to the house which has issued the work 
of an English author, the option of republishing upon 

mutually satisfactory terms the subsequent works of 

1 06 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

the same author. They accuse him of inaccuracy, 
and not merely of lapses, but of tergiversations of 
memory. They accuse him of repudiating a formal 
engagement and of having said what was to his 
knowledge incorrect in informing Messrs. Scribner 
that they were the recognised publishers of only one 
small work of Carlyle's, whereas they were his pub- 
lishers for the " Early Kings of Norway " and " Fred- 
erick," and purchased several of his other works 
from G. P. Putnam. 

It is not necessary for us to enter on the dispute 
of the publishers, but in the course of it there came 
out a bit of evidence which effectually disposes of 
Froude's contention, which, in view of his own ad- 
mission to the contrary, it is truly astonishing to find 
repeated in " My Relations with Carlyle," that Mrs. 
Alexander Carlyle had no claim to the profits of the 
" Reminiscences " and that his offer to let her have 
any part of them was " a spontaneous resolution " of 
his own, and a piece of gratuitous generosity. Mr. 
Moncure Conway (the Mr. X. of Froude's essay, but 
why should his name be concealed?), was in 1879 
representing Messrs. Harper and Brothers in Eng- 
land, and hearing that the " Reminiscences " were in 
contemplation he approached Carlyle on the subject, 
suggesting that the book should appear during his 
lifetime. On the 4th November, 1879, Mr. Moncure 
Conway wrote to Messrs. Harper and Brothers as 
follows : — " The old man was evidently gratified by 
your thoughtfulness in considering whether he might 
not like to have some of the money while yet alive. 
However, he does not desire any money . . . and he 

107 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

desires that all the money which his autobiographical 
work shall bring shall be paid to his niece, Mary 
Aitken Carlyle, who has lived with him since his 
wife's death and is now nursing him, night and day. 
This book is to be added to her share as she well 
deserves." 

Now here we have the testimony of an independ- 
ent and disinterested witness writing in 1879, and 
after direct communication with Carlyle, that, as Mrs. 
Alexander Carlyle consistently maintained, Carlyle 
had decided that the profits of the " Reminiscences " 
should go to her as part of the provision he intended 
to make for her. And that was an equitable arrange- 
ment, for the " Reminiscences," as Carlyle under- 
stood them, consisted entirely of his own literary 
work which he had given to his niece. He had no 
foreshadowing that his instructions would be set at 
naught, and that the Jane Welsh Carlyle Memoir, 
which none but loving eyes should see, would be in- 
corporated in the book for public gaze in both hemi- 
spheres. These essays were amongst the manu- 
scripts which Mrs. Alexander Carlyle had too liber- 
ally lent to Froude for his " Life" of her uncle, but they 
had a biographic rather than an autobiographic value, 
and when they were separated from the other material 
for publication as a separate work, they were placed 
outside Froude 's commission. Froude ultimately es- 
tablished a personal interest in the work by adding to 
it the Jane Welsh Carlyle Memoir, which formed 
part of the manuscripts given and bequeathed to him 
by Carlyle, but during Carlyle's life he never ven- 
tured to moot such a proceeding. Froude wrote to 

108 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

Carlyle on the 29th September, 1879, enumerating 
the names of the articles that were to form the 
"Reminiscences," and the Memoir is not amongst 
them! 

While Carlyle lived Froude made no claim to the 
profits of the " Reminiscences." He told Mrs. Alex- 
ander Carlyle that she had a better right to the 
money than he, as the book was her uncle's writing 
and not his. His exact words, one month before 
Carlyle 's death were : " The book was written by your 
uncle, not by me, and there would be no propriety in 
my receiving the money for it." He regarded him- 
self as merely a trustee of the copyright for her, and 
when she was dining with him on the 20th of No- 
vember, 1879, her husband, Mr. Alexander Carlyle, 
Mr. Ashley Froude and Miss Margaret Froude being 
present, he confirmed this in the most explicit 
manner, promising to hold the whole profits of the 
" Reminiscences " for her. Carlyle died in the belief 
that these profits were part of the provision he had 
made for his niece. It was, therefore, with astonish- 
ment that on the 14th of February, 1881 (Carlyle 
being then dead, and the " Reminiscences " not yet 
published), she heard from Froude that Longman 
had paid him ;^650 for the first edition, out of which 
he proposed to pay her ^300 as half of his receipts — 
" the odd ;^50 I keep for another purpose," that other 
purpose being, it turned out, a subscription in his 
own name to a fund then being raised to buy 5, 
Cheyne Row, and present it to Mrs. Alexander Car- 
lyle. To this Mrs. Alexander Carlyle demurred, as 

being inconsistent with her uncle's intentions and 

109 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

Froude's engagement with her; and on the 21st of 
February, 1881, Sir James Stephen wrote to her that 
Froude was perfectly satisfied with the note of a 
conversation with her which Sir James Stephen had 
himself drafted. The note on this point ran thus: — 

"Mrs. Alexander Carlyle says that Mr. Froude 
some time ago promised to give her the whole pro- 
ceeds of the 'Reminiscences,' and that she informed 
her uncle of his intention, and that he approved it, 
and that under these circumstances she declines to 
receive any share of the proceeds less than the 
whole." 

On the same day, 21st February, 1881, Froude 
wrote to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle : " I had settled in 
my own mind that you ought to have half of the 
English copyright of both books, the 'Reminis- 
cences ' and the ' Life and Letters ' to follow. Of 
course you shall have every farthing that comes from 
tlie ' I^emzmsce72ces,' whether irom England, America, 
or the Continent, and I hope that it will prove as 
good a bargain for you as the other would have 
been. ... I may as well remind you that two-thirds 
of the second volume of the 'Reminiscences ' is from 
the 'Letters and Memorials,' and so mine, if I wished 
to insist on such a thing, which I don't." 

Two days later, on the 23rd of February, Froude 
wrote to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle as follows: "I am 
bound to tell you that Ashley [Froude's son], who 
was present, it seems, at one of the conversations 
about the copyright, entirely confirms yo2(r account 
of it. I am utterly ashamed of myself, and I can only 
suppose that the addition of a new volume with fresh 

no 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

matter [the Jane Welsh Carlyle Memoir] and a gen- 
eral sense that I had been thinking a good deal about 
the American part of the business, had confused my 
memory of what had passed and led me to believe 
that I was free to arrange the details over again. I 
do not wonder now at anything which you may have 
thought of me." 

Whether Froude ever had definitely settled in his 
own mind that half the English copyright of the 
" Reminiscences " and " Life and Letters " ought to 
be Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's, cannot now be known. 
That bargain would have been largely more advan- 
tageous to her than the one she had made and ad- 
hered to, which, although Froude afterwards repudi- 
ated it, he at this time acknowledged in the frankest 
manner. Even Sir James Stephen, Froude 's Jidus 
Achates and champion, was constrained to admit 
Mrs. Carlyle's claim to the profits of the " Reminis- 
cences," for in the preamble to an agreement he pro- 
posed, he wrote: "That it was understood between 
Mrs. Alexander Carlyle and Mr. Froude that Mrs. 
Alexander Carlyle should have the profits of the 
publication of the said volume [' Reminiscences' ] , and 
that such an undertaking was communicated to Mr. 
Carlyle in his lifetime and approved by him." With 
reference to the proposal that all the profits of the 
" Reminiscences," less ;^300 retained by Froude in 
respect of the addition to the book of the Jane Welsh 
Carlyle Memoir, Sir James Stephen wrote : " It 
seems to me that this arrangement would be essen- 
tially just. It would give Mrs. Carlyle what both her 

uncle and Mr. Froude intended her to have. ... It 

III 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

is, indeed, not improbable that she would have been 
better provided for in the will if this expectation on 
the part of her uncle had not existed." 

Will it be believed that after all this, after the 
acknowledgment of her uncle's intentions, and of 
his solemn understanding on the subject with him, 
of her equitable right to the proceeds of what was 
entirely her uncle's work, of his own engagement 
with her which he felt so much shame in having 
attempted to depart from, of his written and many 
times repeated promise, Froude actually refused to 
pay over the profits of the " Reminiscences " to Mrs. 
Alexander Carlyle unless she would admit that it was 
a free gift from him ? Will it be believed that he was 
supported in this by Sir James Stephen.? Sir James 
Stephen wrote to Dr. Benson, Mrs. Alexander 
Carlyle 's solicitor, on the 20th September, 1881 : 
" Mr. Froude admits that she has a moral right to 
the proceeds, less ^300, if she is willing to accept it 
as a present and to admit his property in the MSS. 
But if she refuses what he offers on the terms he 
offers it, he says she has no right to it at all." In 
reply to a letter from Dr. Benson declining any such 
admission on the part of Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, Sir 
James Stephen wrote : " I altogether dissent from the 
view that, if Mrs. Carlyle sues Mr. Froude and fails 
to establish any legal claim against him, he will still 
be under a moral obligation to give her the proceeds 
of the * Reminiscences ' or to return the papers. I 
think that a promise unaccepted is simply an offer 
which the promiser is both legally and morally justi- 
fied in revoking at any time before it is accepted." 

112 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

Sir James Stephen had previously written, be it 
remembered, that Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's claim 
was " essentially just." 

Froude's position seems to have been: "You say 
that I am indebted to you £io in virtue of my engage- 
ment with you and with your uncle, in faith of which 
he died. I admit it, and here is the money; but you 
shall not have it unless you admit that it is a free 
gift from me." 

Sir James Stephen's was: "I spontaneously and 
unconditionally promised you ^lo, but you said I 
was indebted to you in that amount and failed to 
establish your claim, my promise is therefore legally 
and morally null and void." 

Mrs. Alexander Carlyle received the profits and 
copyright of the " Reminiscences " as a gift from her 
uncle ; she declined to accept them or any part of 
them as a gift from Froude, who received ;^300 in 
respect of the "Jane Welsh Carlyle Memoir," and 
every penny of the profits from his " Life of Carlyle," 
notwithstanding that the materials he used were her 
property (and the custom is, we believe, that the 
owner of the material receives half the profits), and 
likewise every penny that came from the Letters and 
Memorials, notwithstanding that she had copied with 
her own hand the Memoir of Jane Welsh Carlyle and 
the whole of her aunt's letters and Carlyle's notes on 
them, twice over. Froude's generosity in handing 
over the profits of the " Reminiscences," as arranged 
with Carlyle, while keeping a firm grip on all the 
rest, is not very apparent. 

In claiming the profits of the " Reminiscences," 
8 113 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

Mrs. Alexander Carlyle was only asking for what 
she believed was justly due to her, and her object in 
seeking legal advice was not, as Froude suggests, to 
enforce the payment of the money, but, if possible, 
to prevent him from misusing the materials for the 
Biography as by common consent he had misused 
those of the " Reminiscences." She repeatedly 
offered to give up the whole proceeds of the first 
issue of the " Reminiscences," which amounted to 
;^i,530, exclusive of the ^300 retained by Froude in 
respect of the Jane Welsh Carlyle Memoir, as well 
as the copyright of the book and all future profits, if 
he would act upon his public undertaking contained 
in his letter to the Times oi May 9th, 1881, and would 
at once restore to her the papers and proceed no 
further with the Biography. When Froude and his 
co-executor. Sir James Stephen, suggested that the 
proceeds of the " Reminiscences," as well as the pa- 
pers, might belong to Mr. Carlyle 's residuary estate, 
she offered to provide a substantial and approved 
indemnity against any possible claim by the residuary 
legatees. She never sought from Froude, nor did he 
ever offer to her any profits beyond those derived 
from the publication of the " Reminiscences," less 
;^300, which he retained " in satisfaction," as Sir 
James Stephen put it, "of any claim he might 
have in respect of the MS. called 'Jane Welsh 
Carlyle,' or in respect of his own labour in prepar- 
ing the work." Seeing that the " Reminiscences " 
was entirely the work of Carlyle's pen, and that 
the book was sent forth practically unedited and 
loaded with errors, most literary men will think 

114 



I 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

that Froude was not inadequately paid for his 
labour. 

Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, however, found herself 
powerless to prevent the further desecration of her 
uncle's memory. She was not at liberty to withdraw 
from Froude the loan of the papers, given to her by 
her uncle, until the purpose for which the loan was 
given was fulfilled, and he was at liberty to go on 
with that work, even after he had twice voluntarily 
offered to give it over into other hands. When in 
1877 she consented to let Froude have the papers 
she had implicit faith in his loyalty. That was the 
time when Sir James Stephen saw him deporting 
himself as the affectionate son to the venerated 
father. That was the time when he was habitually 
beginning his letters to her " My dear Mary." That 
was the time when, with all these shameful , stories 
now belched forth, dwelling in his mind, he wrote to 
her: "You know well that there is no man on earth 
that I love and honour as I do your uncle, and in that 
spirit I hope to work." She never doubted his loy- 
alty, and being young and inexperienced in the ways 
of the world, and, moreover, much occupied in wait- 
ing on her uncle, she did not attempt to make any 
selection from the papers, but sent him a mass of 
material, keeping no inventory, so that she never had 
any definite idea of what she had forwarded, from 
time to time, to Onslow Gardens. Had Froude 
known how he came to be possessed of all Carlyle 's 
private letters, journals, etc., he would scarcely have 
boasted as he did in his letter to the Times, of Feb- 
ruary 14th, 1881, of the trust Carlyle had placed in 

115 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

him. It was Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, who so bounti- 
fully trusted him, not Carlyle, and for having done 
so she bitterly repented. She discovered, when too 
late, that she had placed in Froude's hands much 
that her uncle had never intended him to see, and 
the knowledge that she had thus unwittingly aided 
him in his work of disparagement, preyed on her 
health and spirits, or, as she herself said, broke her 
heart. The complete justification of her forebodings 
and suspicion of Froude's designs has come in " My 
Relations with Carlyle." 

Amongst the papers which Miss Mary Aitken too 
confidingly lent to Froude were the love-letters which 
passed between Carlyle and Miss Welsh before their 
marriage, and which would assuredly never have been 
seen by his or any other eye, had she noticed what 
Carlyle had written respecting them. ''My strict 
comma7id now is 'Burn tJiem ij ever found. Let no 
third party read them ; let no printing of them or any 
part of them be ever thought of by those who love 
me' " And yet in defiance of this heart-felt and, we 
may say, death-bed conjuration, Froude opened the 
packet, read all the letters, and published a selection 
of them, in the Early Life. He never ventured to as- 
sert that there had been any verbal withdrawal of this 
most earnest written command, and his conduct in 
ignoring it may be left to the judgment of right- 
minded men. 

And not only did Froude read the love-letters 
which Carlyle held sacrosanct, not only did he pub- 
lish some of them, but he so selected those which he 
published and so put a gloss on them by his accom- 

ii6 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

panying comments, that they convey an entirely 
erroneous impression of the relations in which Carlyle 
and Miss Welsh stood to each other. It fell to the 
lot of Professor Charles Eliot Norton to compare the 
love-letters published by Froude with the originals 
— a duty, however uncongenial, made imperative by 
Froude 's conduct — and, although Professor Norton 
gives us but partial glimpses of the courtship in a 
few selections, withholding the rest on the ground 
that they are too sacred for publication — he has done 
enough to prove that the characters and relations of 
Carlyle and Miss Welsh to each other during that 
period were different, both in particulars and in gen- 
eral effect, from those depicted by Froude. Professor 
Norton openly charged Froude with having in the 
case of the love-letters diverged from the truth, made 
assertions incompatible with the evidence, and with 
having coloured by his own imagination, those state- 
ments, having the form of truth, which he preserved. 
This was no irresponsible chatter in a newspaper; 
it was not a mere rumour. It was a well-weighed 
charge, by an eminent man of letters, and supported 
by convincing documentary evidence. It was made 
in 1886. Froude never replied to it. He has no 
word to say about it in " My Relations with Carlyle," 
written the following year. With reference to Pro- 
fessor Norton's charges against Froude the Athe- 
ncBum (November 6th, 1893) said: " The charges are 
very grave indeed, and as Froude in his letter to the 
Times makes no answer to these statements, it must 
be assumed that he allows judgment to go by 

default." 

117 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

Space will not permit of the reproduction of the 
series of striking instances given by Professor Norton 
of Froude's warping and varnishing of the love- 
letters, but one illustration, of his style of going to 
work and of the amount of trust to be reposed in 
him, may be given. " Mr. Froude tells the story, 
which will be remembered by all readers of the book, 
of the relations between Edward Irving and Miss 
Welsh, of his falling in love with her after his engage- 
ment to his future wife, of her reciprocation of his 
feeling, of her refusal to encourage him because of 
the bonds by which he was held, and of the conclu- 
sion of the affair by his marriage to Miss Martin. It 
was an affair discreditable to Irving, and for a time 
it brought much suffering to Miss Welsh. Mr. 
Froude is aware that the telling of such a private 
experience requires excuse, and he justifies it by the 
following plea : — * I should not unveil a story so sacred 
in itself, and in which the public have no concern, 
merely to amuse their curiosity ; but Mrs. Carlyle's 
character was profoundly affected by this early dis- 
appointment, and cannot be understood without a 
knowledge of it. Carlyle himself, though acquainted 
generally with the circumstances, never realised 
completely the intensity of the feeling which had 
beeen crushed.' 

" Both of these alleged grounds of excuse are con- 
tradicted by the evidence of the letters of Miss Welsh 
and Carlyle. Her letters show that her feelings for 
Irving, first controlled by principle and honour, soon 
underwent a very natural change. Her love for him 

was the passion of an ardent and inexperienced girl, 

ii8 



¥ 

i 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

twenty or twenty-one years old, whose character was 
undeveloped, and who had but an imperfect under- 
standing of the capacities and demands of her own 
nature. In the years that followed upon this inci- 
dent she made rapid progress in self-knowledge and 
in the knowledge of others, chiefly through Carlyle's 
influence, and she came to a more just estimate of 
Irving's character than she had originally formed. 
Irving's letters to her, his career in London, his pub- 
lished writings, revealed to her clear discernment his 
essential weakness, — his vanity, his mawkish senti- 
mentality, his self-deception, his extravagance verging 
to cant in matters of religion. The contrast between 
his nature and Carlyle's did 'affect her profoundly,' 
and her temporary passion for Irving was succeeded 
by a far deeper and healthier love. 'What an idiot 
I was for ever thinking that man so estimable,' she 
wrote in May, 1824." It will be recollected that 
she afterwards pointedly remarked, that if she had 
married Irving there would have been no gift of 
tongues. 

The whole tendency of the love-letters, as given 
by Froude, is to put Carlyle in an unpleasant and 
intensely selfish light. This is evinced in many 
minor disparaging statements, so made as to avoid 
arousing suspicion of their having little or no founda- 
tion, and so arranged as to contribute artfully to the 
general effect of depreciation. Like the " Reminis- 
cences," the love-letters are thickly studded with 
errors and unnoted omissions of words, clauses, and 
sentences, which sometimes interfere seriously with 

the meaning. 

119 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

What has been said of the Froude version of the 
love-letters as regards their disposition to make the 
worst of Carlyle, applies to all the early letters made 
use of by Froude. One has but to read these letters 
in Froude's " Life" with his comments, and compare 
them with Professor Norton's series of early Letters 
without comment, to recognise two different streams 
of tendency. The latter do not leave a bad taste in 
the mouth. The impression they make is vastly 
more agreeable. The sense of sourness and cynicism 
is submerged in floods of kindliness and geniality. 
Even when Froude is most favourable to Carlyle, he 
does not succeed in inducing the same degree of 
sympathy and admiration that Norton's Letters 
evoke. Froude depicts Carlyle's relations with his 
father and mother and brothers and sisters as credit- 
able to him — he could not avoid doing so — but in 
Norton's letters these relations become generous and 
delightful. We discover him there the affectionate, 
thoughtful, reverent son, and considerate monitor 
and liberal-handed guide of the rest of the family 
circle. We see him in far manlier, gentler, more 
gracious form than Froude has suggested to us. 

Froude's allegation — made to suggest a sordid 
motive — that "more than once inquiries had been 
made of me by her [Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's] law- 
yers when there would be any further money coming 
to her from other editions?" is at variance with the 
facts. Copies of all Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's law- 
yers' letters have been preserved, and in not one of 
them is there any inquiry about a second edition. 
The lawyers are happily alive and are ready to meet 

120 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

Froude's statement with a flat denial. It was 
Froude's lawyers who first raised the question of a 
second edition of the " Reminiscences." On the 
i2th of January, 1886, they wrote: "The 'Reminis- 
cences ' of Thomas Carlyle are now out of print and 
a new edition is, or soon will be, required. . . . He 
[Mr. Froude] proposes that, as Mrs. Mary Carlyle is 
to have the profit of the work, she should correct 
and edit the new edition, but with this proviso that 
the Memoir of Mrs. Jane W. Carlyle is withdrawn 
from the book. This Memoir being Mr. Froude's 
property in every sense of the word, he does not 
intend it to appear again with the 'Reminiscences,' 
but will attach it as a preface to the ' Letters of Mrs. 
Carlyle.' " 

The nonchalance of this proposal will be under- 
stood when it is remembered that ;^300 had been paid 
to Mr. Froude for the use of this Memoir in the 
" Reminiscences " together with his editorial labours. 
Of course the proposal was objected to and the 
objection was sustained. How interesting it is to 
note that Froude had at length discovered that the 
Jane Welsh Carlyle Memoir had been dislocated from 
its proper attachments, and that its right place was 
as a preface to the Letters ! 

Throughout " My Relations with Carlyle " Froude 

assumes the attitude of an injured person and solicits 

public commiseration. The task of writing Carlyle's 

Biography was, he says, thrust on him, he accepted 

it with reluctance, he several times resolved to go no 

further with it, but disinterested friendship carried 

him on at a great personal sacrifice, and, while he 

121 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

might have produced a popular work that would 
have pleased ever>'body, he courageously chose to 
incur obloquy in order to insure to Carlyle that post- 
mortem immolation which he had so earnestly 
desired. No one kept faith with him. Carlyle ought 
to have informed him that he intended the papers 
should be made use of by others. Mrs. Alexander 
Carlyle ought to have infoniied him that the papers 
were hers. Mr. Norton ought to have communicated 
with him. But everybody did what they ought not 
to have done and he was left lamenting. 

Whether the work of becoming Carlyle 's biogra- 
pher was thrust on Froude, or whether he diligently 
sought it, it is now impossible to say. It was unlike 
Carlyle to thrust such a task on any one, and up till 
1877 he abjured any biography of himself. That 
Froude was reluctant to undertake it, is not apparent. 
He did twice threaten to throw it up, but, when 
pressed to surrender it, he clung to it stubbornly. 
However much friendship may have mingled with it, 
that it was a disinterested undertaking cannot be 
maintained, for it brought Froude very large profits. 
It is distasteful to have to allude to the money ques- 
tion; but it is Froude who has introduced it by 
attributing to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle the most 
mercenary motives, and indeed even dishonesty, in 
making a claim to money to which she was not justly 
entitled, while at the same time he is dwelling on his 
own generosity. A casual reader of " My Relations 
with Carlyle" might rise from the perusal of it, 
believing that Mrs. Alexander Carlyle had greedily 
grasped at ev-erything and that Froude had worked 

122 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

for nothing. It is therefore necessary to point out 
that Froude was well paid for all he did. We have 
reason to believe that his " Life of Carlyle " was the 
most remunerative piece of literary work in which 
he ever engaged. He has told us that the profits of 
the first issue of the "Reminiscences" amounted to 
£1,82,0. Let his representatives tell us what have 
been the profits of his seven subsequent volumes, 
and the public will then be in a position to judge 
whether he was quite as disinterested and badly used 
as lie tries to make out. The " Letters and Memo- 
rials," which he had merely to edit for the press, 
were a handsome legacy, and from the other papers 
he drew no small reward, or what he himself would 
describe as " an immense sum." 

That Froude, in order that Carlyle might enjoy 
that posthumous penance which he extolled as 
heroic, but which common men must regard as 
idiotic, braved a storm of public censure, is mere 
moonshine. He has told us that he was "quite 
unprepared for the violence of censure " with which 
the " Reminiscences" was received. " Those tender 
and suffering passages," he wrote, "which I was 
universally reproached for having published, I 
thought, and I still think, were precisely those which 
would win and command the pity and sympathy of 
mankind." The fact is that he made a miscalcula- 
tion, — a huge and grievous one, — and mankind at 
once found him out and condemned him accordingly. 
If Carlyle did hanker after a moral cremation, and 
there is not a shred of evidence beyond Froude's 
imaginary conversations that he ever did so, it was a 

123 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

senile and morbid epiphenomenon of distracting 
grief, which a true friend should have taken at its 
real value. What good could come to any mortal 
man from perpetuating the wailings of a grief-tortured 
soul, from reverberating them and founding on them 
a story of life-long delinquency? The only effect 
that Froude's action could have would be to impair 
and weaken the influence of Carlyle, of the impor- 
tance of which, he declares, he had such a high sense, 
and which will, he prophesied, increase with each 
generation. He has done his best to put a stop to 
it. If all the world is to be made every great man's 
valet, and if the tenderest tremors of his heart-strings, 
in the pensive twilight, are to be trumpeted abroad 
as the quakings of a guilty soul, we had better have 
no biographies at all. 

In "My Relations with Carlyle" Froude has ad- 
vanced in rancour far beyond the " Life," and while 
attempting to blacken his subject has hopelessly 
stultified himself. " The only life of a man," he has 
written, " which is not worse than useless is a * Life ' 
which tells all the truth so far as the biographer 
knows it." He wrote what purported to be a true 
Life of Carlyle, in which he expressly stated he had 
concealed nothing, but all the time he had up his 
sleeve a series of shocking charges which he held 
ready, on occasion, to produce, and which his son 
and daughter have now tabled. The charges are 
false, but if they had been true, what good could 
their production do? Surely it was fatuous to 
imagine that Froude could clear his own honour if 

assailed, by throwing shame on the memory of the 

124 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

dead man who had trusted him, whose loving friend 
he professed to be, whose reputation he had already 
injured, and from whom he had derived large pecu- 
niary advantage ? The charge against Froude was 
that he had misunderstood Carlyle, and had in his 
haste, inaccuracy of vision, and imaginative miscon- 
ception, depicted him in a sombre and unfavourable 
light, and made him appear quite other than he was. 
His retort to that charge is, " I was too kind to him : 
he was hideous and repulsive, and I knew it all the 
time." Is there in the history of Biography another 
instance of perfidy like this.? There has assuredly 
been no literary outrage approaching it since the 
publication of Hogg's brochure on " The Domestic 
Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott." 

With plaintive air Froude asks what motive he 
could have had beyond his desire to gratify Carlyle 's 
remorse, and to mete out stern justice, for the course 
which he took in his " Life of Carlyle " } We would 
rather leave motives alone and deal with actions, but 
it is Froude who twice over has challenged an exam- 
ination of his motives. It is true, as he says, that no 
one does wrong without some motive, but motives 
are often beyond sounding depth — and the most 
potent of them are sometimes the most unfathomable. 
It is possible that'some of the motives which actuated 
Froude in his dealings with Carlyle's biographical 
material were sub-liminal in their operation and 
unknown to himself; but on the surface, motives, not 
wanting in strength, are discernible. Froude is not 
entitled to say " I had no secret injuries to resent." 
It is not improbable that some of Carlyle's too out- 

125 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

spoken strictures on his writings, such as that they 
displayed "a fondness for indecent exposure," and 
his far from complimentary references to him in the 
letters he read, may have rankled in his breast, and 
it is at any rate certain, from the contents of this 
pamphlet, that there was a sense of injury as to the 
manner in which Carlyle had disposed of his papers. 
" If he had intended," says Froude, '* that these 
papers should be made use of by others and in oppo- 
sition to the judgment at which I should arrive, 
should that judgment not coincide with theirs, then 
he was not dealing fairly with me." " In his will," he 
says, "he had left his papers to his brother John. 
This, too, I did not know and I ought to have been 
informed of it." " If it was so," he says again (if the 
papers had been given to his niece Miss Maiy Aitken, 
as they undoubtedly were\ " I had again been treated 
unfairly, for I ought to have been infonned of it ; but 
all was left uncertain, all was in confusion." Finally 
he puts it bluntly enough, "but faith had not been 
kept with me." Froude does not seem to have kept 
his sense of grievance to himself, but infected with it 
Sir James Stephen, w^ho says: " The whole difficulty 
in this matter arose from the feebleness and indeci- 
sion — natural enough in extreme old age — which 
prevented Mr. Carlyle from making up his mind 
conclusively as to what he wished to be done about 
his papers, and having his decision put into writing." 
Unquestionably when Froude came to arrange and 
comment on these papers the old reverence which 
led him at one time to regard Carlyle as almost 
superhuman, so that he reflected how every word he 

126 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

wrote would seem in his eyes, in order that affecta- 
tion might be avoided, had evaporated, and there had 
come in its place a rigorous appraisement of the 
many faults and failings of the erstwhile hero — 
amongst which had been some want of candour in 
his conferences with James Anthony Froude. Love 
and admiration there still were, Froude assures us, 
but mingled with these was grave reprehension and 
— shall we say — wounded aynour propre 1 

But if it was in this mood that Froude entered on 
his biographical campaign, other motives determining 
its course and issue soon came into play. The 
"Reminiscences" appeared, and were received, as he 
has told us, with a violence of censure for which he 
was quite unprepared, and from that moment it 
became an object with him to justify himself. In- 
stead of bowing to the universal condemnation of his 
indiscretions and observing reticence and discrimi- 
nation in his further progress in the work, he bent 
himself to make good his case, and influenced no 
doubt by the knowledge that he had in his keeping, 
as a last resort, those shocking secrets which he has 
enshrined in the pamphlet now given to the world, 
he proceeded with his theme of adulatory defamation. 
His mind was poisoned against Carlyle by the con- 
ception he had formed of his treatment of his wife, 
and do what he might, amidst all the nectar and 
ambrosia, the subtle and deadly venom would, from 
time to time, trickle out. In Froude's somewhat 
rank imagination conceptions grew apace. Once 
formed they were expanded from within and never 

subjected to the pressure of facts from without. And 

127 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

so his malign conception of Carlyle gathered strength 
as he went on, and is seen in full force in his posthu- 
mous paper. Let it be granted that he wished to 
limn truly the portrait in his mind's eye, yet that 
portrait was blotched and discoloured, and in putting 
it on his canvas he emphasised the blemishes and 
deepened the shadows. He aimed at producing a 
popular book — what biographer does not? and he 
was not ignorant that startling effects and controver- 
sial matter are attractive in literature. His " Neme- 
sis of Faith," which he himself described as " hetero- 
doxy flavoured with sentimentalism," did not attract 
much attention until Sewell publicly burnt a copy 
of it in the Hall of Exeter College. The sale then 
went up with a bound, and there was a call for a 
second edition within a year. And so the " Remi- 
niscences," although universally condemned, was a 
decided pecuniary success. The " Reminiscences " 
was bad enough, but the first two volumes of the 
" Life " were worse. This is a book that to all who 
knew the truth, caused pain by the artful detraction 
that lurks behind its professions of friendship, admi- 
ration, and even reverence. It is a cynical betrayal 
of a trust and serves to warrant the most sinister 
inferences concerning Carlyle 's character that were 
drawn from the " Reminiscences." No unbiased 
person can read it carefully without a conviction that 
the original text — the Letters — does not support 
Froude's commentary, and that the Letters them- 
selves have been glossed, distorted from their plain 
significance, and misinterpreted with perverse inge- 
nuity. The process is discoverable by all who look 

128 



THE NEMESIS OF FROUDE 

beneath the surface, and in it Froude has revealed 
his own nature. The wrong done to Carlyle was a 
grievous one, but it is being redressed; his real 
character will yet shine out through all Froude's 
obscurations. 

" My Relations with Carlyle " is a kind of literary 
garbage, and, like garbage, creates disgust, but like 
garbage also it may not be without its use in nature, 
if it promote the growth of a just estimate of the 
spirit and methods of its author. 

Intellectually fulfilling one's ideal of greatness, a 
man made in the noblest human mould, in originality, 
in range of historical knowledge, in breadth of literary 
culture, in command of language, in lustre of imagina- 
tion, in grasp of judgment, unsurpassed in his cen- 
tury, Carlyle will yet be recognised, through the mists 
and miasms that Froude has drawn around him, and 
through the gloom of his own moodiness and melan- 
choly, as morally as well as intellectually great. He 
was, verily, one of the kindliest, most generous, true- 
hearted, humane, and upright of men, in whom, 
under a rugged exterior, were great depths of tender- 
ness and comprehensive sympathy, who with intense 
earnestness combined quaint pleasantry and genial 
humour. When his shallow and ribald critics are 
forgotten, his memory will be cherished by the world. 



129 



APPENDIXES 



APPENDIX 
I 

THE CARLYLE PAPERS 

In a pamphlet which was printed for private circulation in 
1 886, and which has been given to the public as an Appendix 
to " My Relations with Carlyle," Sir James Stephen's view 
of Froude's dealings with Carlyle's papers is very fully set 
forth. Sir James was co-executor with Froude under the 
codicil to Carlyle's will, was aware of everything that took 
place during the negotiations after Carlyle's death, and was 
a man of high intellectual endowments and of judicial train- 
ing, so that great weight naturally attaches to his opinion in 
the case. That opinion amounts to a vindication of Froude's 
conduct, to which is added a warm eulogium on the integrity 
and purity of his motives. At first sight it seems to justify 
all that Froude did and to re-establish his reputation, at 
least in as far as the use of the Carlyle papers was concerned ; 
but a closer examination will, we believe, convince the open- 
minded that as it was founded on evidence, much of which 
has been proved to be erroneous, and is not altogether free 
from partizan bias, it does not possess the authoritative char- 
acter that Froude ascribes to it, and cannot be regarded as 
a final award. It was, of course, not a judicial opinion, but 
that of Froude's advocate in the case. 

Sir James Stephen had somehow formed an exalted esti- 
mate of Froude's ability and character and would not listen 
to anything reflecting on either. He stood aloof from what 
Froude has himself described as the storm of censure and 
indignation with which the " Reminiscences " was received, 
and legitimately prided himself on having defeated the at- 

133 



APPENDIX 

tempt made to prevent him from writing Carlyle's Life. He 
entertained towards him feehngs of deep personal attach- 
ment, so that in reply to a conciliatory letter from Mrs. 
Alexander Carlyle, asking advice in the interests of peace, he 
wrote, declining to help her as she had consulted a solicitor 
and said : " If you have occasion to communicate further with 
me on the subject, please observe that Mr. Froude is my 
intimate and valued friend." 

Sir James Stephen accepted the version of his intimate 
and valued friend's relations with Carlyle without question 
or demur, and the version presented to him must have been 
very different from that which is now given to us, for he is 
able to say that he had never heard Froude utter "one 
ill-natured word" about Carlyle or express anything but 
unqualified admiration of him morally and intellectually. It 
was perhaps professions of unmixed admiration and unvary- 
ing benignity that led Sir James Stephen to accept siviplici- 
/^/'Froude's assurance that Carlyle had deputed him to make 
atonement for him, by taking out probate, in solemn form, 
of all his little faults. It is clear, however, that Sir James 
Stephen did not know the measure of those faults according 
to Froude's valuation of them. They were nothing and 
amounted to nothing. Sir James thought, in the great bal- 
ance of Carlyle's qualities. He believed that, as there was 
no life that would bear a more severe scrutiny, there could 
be no harm m exhibiting such small flaws as freckled it and 
proved it human. Had Sir James Stephen been aware that 
the time would come when Froude would hold Carlyle up to 
public obloquy as being all flaws, with no sound part in him, 
as selfish, cruel, arrogant, neglected, hypocritical, as a man 
who ought never to have married, a Lothario and a wife- 
beater, the testimonial he gave him would probably have 
been couched in language somewhat different from that in 
which it now appears. Had he realised that he had been 
himself deceived by Froude, that Carlyle's alleged ill-treat- 
ment of his wife was a fiction, and his desire for expiation 
the figment of a distorted imagination, and that some of the 

134 



APPENDIX 

statements made to him about the papers were inconsistent 
with fact, we may question whether there would have been 
any testimonial at all. Sir James Stephen was a just man 
and loved decorum, and that he would have disapproved of 
Froude's later revelations, if true, and condemned them ut- 
terly being false, there can be no doubt. Had he known 
what we now do, he could not possibly have said, as he did 
in his letter to Froude, that he believed his revelations about 
Carlyle up to that date to be " the truth, the whole truth, 
and nothing but the truth " ; he would not probably have 
taken upon himself the trouble to prepare, although there 
were solicitors engaged on behalf of the executors, the case 
which was submitted to counsel for them, or to write long 
and very able letters to Dr. Benson in defence of Froude, 
which seem to us, however, to be in parts somewhat casuis- 
tical. 

Sir James Stephen's strong advocacy of Froude's case in 
the Carlyle controversy was undoubtedly due to his unlim- 
ited and unique faith in him. Whatever Froude said must 
be true. He could not entertain the claim to her uncle's 
papers of Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, a woman of unimpeach- 
able veracity — her uncle so styled her in his will — because it 
depended on an oral communication, but he saw no difficulty 
in adopting the statements of Froude — a man whose inac- 
curacy was even then a bye-word — although these were 
founded entirely on oral communications. Froude's commis- 
sion to write Carlyle's life rested on an oral communication ; 
he had no writing to show for it. The alleged gift of the 
papers to him was by oral communication. The alleged 
permission to publish the "Memoir of Jane Welsh Car- 
lyle," notwithstanding the prohibition on publication attached 
to it, was by oral communication. The alleged permission 
to burn the papers was by oral communication. The sup- 
posed outpourings of remorse and instructions for the pos- 
thumous penitential parade were by oral communications, 
Froude must have felt that he was making rather too heavy 
demands on trust in his own memory, for he says in " My 

135 



APPENDIX 

Relations with Carlyle," " I see now — I saw it before, but I 
was unwilling to worry him — that I ought to have insisted 
on receiving from him in writing his own distinct directions." 

Most of the points raised in Sir James Stephen's letter 
with regard to the Carlyle papers have been answered in our 
reply to Froude's "Apologia" in which they are also raised. 
The most material point was the ownership of these papers, 
and as to this, evidence has been adduced which we believe 
proves that they became Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's property 
in 1875 by gift from her uncle. It is desirable, however, to 
make some observations on the memorandum which Sir 
James Stephen quotes at length and which he thinks dis- 
poses of that claim — a claim which, evidently in ignorance 
of Froude's letters to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle of 8th and 
lOth February, 1880, and to the Times of 25 th February, 
1 881, Sir James Stephen says neither Froude nor he had any 
notice of until they were informed of it by Mrs. Alexander 
Carlyle's solicitors in June, 1881, and which he somewhat 
discourteously, not to say questionably, insinuated was not 
present to her mind at the time the memorandum was writ- 
ten, but only occurred to her or was invented after she had 
talked over the matter with her friends. 

The following is the memorandum in full, as copied by Sir 
J. Stephen, and sent to Mrs. A. Carlyle, with the covering 
letter:— 

*'32, De Vere Gardens, S.W., 

'■'■ z\st February^ 1881. 

"My Dear Mrs. Carlyle, 

" This is the copy of the memorandum I made this after- 
noon ; I have shown it to Froude, and he will write to you 
on the subject himself. He is perfectly satisfied. 

" Yours sincerely, 

"J. F. Stephen." 



136 



APPENDIX 

Memorandum of Mrs. A. Carlyle's Understanding 
OF THE Facts Relating to Mr. Carlyle's Papers. 

1. Papers relating to the late Mrs. Carlyle be- 
queathed to Mr. Froude by the will of Mr. Carlyle. 
These papers Mrs. A. Carlyle considers to be Mr. 
Froude's absolutely. 

2. The papers relating to Mr. Carlyle's father, Mr. 
Irving, and Lord Jeffrey, intended to be published under 
the title of " Reminiscences," Mrs. A. Carlyle also un- 
derstands to have been given to Mr. Froude after the 
death of Mr. Forster, though she does not know what 
may have passed between Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Froude 
on the subject. She, however, says that Mr. Froude some 
time ago promised to give her the whole of the proceeds 
of the " Reminiscences " when published, and that she 
informed her uncle of this intention, and that he ap- 
proved of it, and under these circumstances she declines 
to receive any share of the proceeds less than the whole. 

3. The papers relating to Mr. Carlyle and intended 
to serve as materials for his biography. These papers 
Mrs. A. Carlyle understands to have been given to Mr. 
Froude so that the property in them passed to him. 
She also understands that Mr. Carlyle intended that any 
profit to be derived from the book, for which they were 
to be materials, was to go to Mr. Froude, and she has 
no wish to interfere in any way with Mr. Froude's dis- 
cretion as to the use to be made of these papers. On 
the other hand, Mrs. A. Carlyle considers that Mr. 
Froude ought not to burn or otherwise destroy any of 
these papers, but to return them to her (Mrs. A. Car- 
lyle) after the biography for which they are to be used 
as materials is published. J. F. Stephen. 

February 21, 1881. 

We have here given the memorandum exactly as copied 
by Sir James Stephen and sent by him to Mrs. Alexander 

137 



APPENDIX 

Carlyle, and it is well worth noting that the memorandum as 
printed in " My Relations with Carlyle " differs from that 
copy in three particulars. In the first line of the first para- 
graph Mr. has been substituted for Mrs. Carlyle. In the 
fifth line of the third paragraph " her uncle " has been sub- 
stituted for Mr. Carlyle^ and in the sixth line of the same 
paragraph are has been substituted for tvere. The substitu- 
tion of Mr. for Mrs. Carlyle and of are for were alter the 
meaning of the memorandum in a manner adverse to Mrs. 
Alexander Carlyle's claim and are therefore not without 
significance. 

But further, the note appended to the memorandum in 
" My Relations with Carlyle " is very different from the note 
actually sent with it to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, and which 
in Sir James Stephen's handwriting is now before us. 

Note in ^^ My Relations with Carlyle." 

This was written in the presence of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle 
and Mr. Ouvry and was accepted by Mrs. Carlyle as a full 
statement of her views. I sent her a copy of it this day> 
February 22, 1881. — J. F. S. 

Note actually received by Mrs. Alexafider Carlyle. 

I made this memorandum this day in the presence of Mr. 
and Mrs. A. Carlyle and Mr. Ouvry, and Mrs. A. Carlyle 
said that it correctly expressed her views. I have also read 
it to Mr. Froude. — J. F. Stephen. 

In view of subsequent events it is interesting to note that, 
according to Sir James Stephen, Froude was "perfectly 
satisfied " with the memorandum as sent to Mrs. Alexander 
Carlyle. 

Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, however, was never perfectly 
satisfied with it. It "correctly expressed her views" in so 
far as the effect of it was, as she supposed, to give Froude 
"absolutely " only the manuscript " Letters and Memorials of 
Jane Welsh Carlyle," to which his right was never in dispute, 
and to give him also the possession and use of the materials 

138 



APPENDIX 

for the " Reminiscences " and Biography, until these works 
were published, on the understanding that all the manu- 
scripts and papers with which he had been entrusted, except 
the manuscript "Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh 
Carlyle," should then be returned to her intact and none 
destroyed meantime; and, lastly, to give Mrs. Alexander 
Carlyle the whole proceeds of the "Reminiscences" and 
Froude the whole proceeds of the Biography. 

To Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, the phrase "given to Mr. 
Froude," twice used by Sir James Stephen, conveyed the 
same meaning that "delivered to Mr. Froude," or "placed 
in Mr. Froude's hands " would have done, and so was equally 
consistent with a gift or loan ; but in the third paragraph of 
the memorandum, which deals with the materials for the 
Biography, Sir James Stephen distinguished these from the 
materials for the " Reminiscences " by adding, " so that the 
property in them passed to him " [Froude]. Mrs. Alexander 
Carlyle did not fully understand this piece of legal phrase- 
ology, which was not explained to her ; but supposed it to 
mean that in the case of the materials for the Biography, 
unlike those for the " Reminiscences," Froude was to have 
the profits of their publication. As this was in accordance 
with the tenor of the memorandum, she did not at the time, 
nor afterwards, until the phrase in question was most un- 
fairly used against her as evidence that her claim to the 
papers was an afterthought, attribute any importance to it, 
believing that the papers were to be restored to her as soon 
as the Biography was finished. Why should she split hairs 
about a phrase, which so distinguished a man as Sir James 
Stephen, of whom she had no suspicion, employed as the 
right one ? When Sir James Stephen wrote, as he did at 
first, " given by Mr. Carlyle," Mrs. Alexander Carlyle said, 
" No, not by Mr. Carlyle, but by me ; they were given by 
me." Thereupon Sir James Stephen, at her instance, struck 
out the words " by Mr. Carlyle," but added the words " so 
that the property passed to him." To this Mrs. Alexander 
Carlyle said nothing, because she agreed that Froude was 

139 



APPENDIX 

to have the profits of the Biography, and only stipulated that 
the materials were to be returned to her when the work was 
accomplished. 

Possession, for the time being, of the papers, with the 
right to use them and also to take the profits of publication, 
which, in the case of the Biography, Mrs. Alexander Carlyle 
always conceded to Froude, would naturally seem to her 
very much the same thing as the right of property for the 
time being, and it was but to be temporary whilst the 
Biography was in progress. Indeed, as every jurist knows, 
property, according to the old Roman definition of it, is jtis 
utendi,friiC7idi, abntendi, and given, as in this case, the right 
of use and the right to take the fruits, only the right to 
destroy or part with remains, and this was expressly denied 
to Froude. 

The phrase, therefore, after all, although Mrs. Alexander 
Carlyle was dissatisfied with it and complained of it when 
she discovered the use to which it was put, is not, at all 
events to the lay mind, very inappropriate to the transaction, 
which the memorandum sought to define and interpret, and, 
in view of the abundant evidence now forthcoming that Mrs. 
Alexander Carlyle's claim to the papers was not an after- 
thought, but a claim acknowledged and enforced by Carlyle 
himself in his lifetime, and then and afterwards admitted by 
Froude in public and private, orally and in writing, it may 
seem superfluous to dwell further on the circumstances 
under which the memorandum was written. Nevertheless, 
as the memorandum vi^as Sir James Stephen's sheet-anchor 
in his subsequent dealings with Mrs. Alexander Carlyle'and 
her solicitors, and a principal foundation of his estimate of 
Froude's rectitude and generosity, and, as prominence is 
given to it in "My Relations with Carlyle," it may be 
well to point out that Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's respon- 
sibility for its terms is limited by the following consider- 
ations : — 

I. Carlyle died on the 5th February, 1 881, Mrs. Alexander 
Carlyle having been his constant companion from 1868, and 

140 



APPENDIX 

having nursed him during his infirmity and in his last illness. 
He was buried at Ecclefechan on loth February. 

2. The memorandum, dated 21st February, 1881, was 
written at a formal meeting for the reading of the will, and 
was therefore prepared at a time when Mrs. Alexander Car- 
lyle was overcome by grief and fatigue, and was not in a con- 
dition to transact important business. 

3. It is in the handwriting of Sir James Stephen, and the 
phraseology is his, and it was written by Sir James Stephen 
at a time when, as he says himself, he " was very superficially 
acquainted with these matters," and was his summary in his 
own language of what he calls "a diffuse statement" by 
Mrs. Alexander Carlyle "as to the details." 

4. It is not signed by Mrs. Alexander Carlyle. 

5. Although it deals with matters of the utmost impor- 
tance, involving, besides even serious issues, pecuniary inter- 
ests to the amount of thousands of pounds, about which 
differences had already arisen, the memorandum was written 
on the spur of the moment, no draft of it was submitted to 
Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, and no opportunity was given to 
her of taking independent advice or even of reflection, before 
her verbal assent was asked to its terms. 

6. At this time Mrs. Alexander Carlyle reposed entire 
confidence in Sir James Stephen, and nothing had happened 
to suggest to her his partiality for Froude which afterwards 
became manifest. It was not until after the 9th May, 1881, 
when he counselled Froude to repudiate his public offer of 
that date to restore the materials for the Biography without 
writing it, and the 14th May, when he wrote to Mrs. Alex- 
ander Carlyle requesting her to remember that Froude was 
his " intimate and valued friend," that she realised that he 
was prejudiced against her. 

It need scarcely be said that a memorandum drafted under 
these circumstances, and merely read over to a lady, who 
was no lawyer and was not asked to sign it, ought not to be 
pressed against her, on technical grounds of construction, 
beyond her own statement of what she understood by it 

141 



APPENDIX 

when she accepted it, in conversation, as correctly express- 
ing her views. 

The following statement was made in May, 1881, in sup- 
port of Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's claim to the ownership of 
her uncle's papers : 

Mrs. Alexander Carlyle. 

I am the niece of the late Mr. Thomas Carlyle, with whom 
I resided at Cheyne Row from 1 868 until his death, except 
for six months in the year 1873. When I went to reside 
with my uncle I had just left school, and as I grew older 
I became his constant companion and amanuensis. From 
1875, when a change of housekeeper took place, I had the 
superintendence of my uncle's house and the custody of 
most of its contents, but not the superintendence of his pri- 
vate affairs. As to his private affairs, my uncle was assisted 
by his brother. Dr. John Carlyle, who used to balance his 
private accounts, and by Mr. Forster, who used to settle his 
publisher's accounts. After Mr. Forster's death in 1876 Mr. 
Ouvry settled the publisher's accounts for 1878, and I did so 
afterwards. My uncle always drew his own cheques. 

As to the contents of the house, I divide them into four 
classes, which, for the reasons presently mentioned, I treated 
differently. 

First, there were my uncle's private business pa- 
pers, such as his accounts with printers and publishers ; 
accounts connected with his Scotch estate of Craigen- 
puttock ; his cheque books ; his banker's pass book ; the 
lease of the house ; Dr. John Carlyle's will, made about 
1853; old chequebooks; old bargains with publishers ; 
and receipted accounts. There were also my uncle's 
own will, his purse, and photographs of his wife and 
mother. I never had the custody or charge of any of 
these documents and personal effects. They were kept 
142 



APPENDIX 

by my uncle, some in a large secretaire with pigeon- 
holes which stood in the dining-room, and some in a 
writing-desk and chest of drawers combined which stood 
in his bedroom. When my uncle gave me the keys of 
the house he retained the key of these repositories. 
With this class should also come my uncle's ward- 
robe. 

Secondly, there were the usual contents of a house- 
keeper's storeroom, of which I had the management and 
superintendence, and in respect of which the house- 
keeper was responsible to me. Of these of course I was 
steward only. 

Thirdly, there was the furniture, plate, linen, china, 
books, prints, pictures, and other gifts, given by my 
uncle's will, made in 1873, to my uncle Dr. John Car- 
lyle, and by the codicil to Dr. Carlyle for life, with re- 
mainder to me absolutely. These, under the circum- 
stances presently detailed, I came to regard as to be 
mine on the death of my uncle Thomas Carlyle, whether 
Dr. Carlyle should be then living or not. 

Fourthly, there were my uncle's letters, manu- 
scripts, and papers, and his wife's jewelry. These, under 
the circumstances presently detailed, became mine in 
1875 by my uncle's gift, although I was always anxious 
to observe any wish he had respecting them, and was 
naturally backward to speak of them as mine during his 
life, never anticipating (except on the [occasion which 
gave rise to the correspondence of February, 1 880) that 
there would be any difficulty after my uncle's death 
respecting my ownership of them from 1875. 

The origin of the gift was as follows : — 

In June, 1875, my uncle Thomas Carlyle bought seven 
£1000 1873 5^ Russian Bonds from our next door-neighbour, 
Mr. Laisn6, a stockbroker. On the 30th of June, 1875, these 
bonds were delivered to him, and as I sat writing in the 
dining-room at Cheyne Row after breakfast my uncle alto- 

143 



APPENDIX 

gether unexpectedly brought me one of these bonds and 
gave it to me as a present. He said that he had in addition 
to this provision for me left me by his Will £500. He also 
told me that he had left to his brother John (my uncle Dr- 
John Carlyle, who was then staying with us at Cheyne Row) 
all the things in the house as they stood, but that he now 
gave these same things to me instead, which arrangement he 
had explained to his brother John who would also speak of 
it to me. He also said specifically that he gave me also his 
papers and his wife's jewelry. He said, "I give you the 
papers and all the jewels of your aunt." He at the same 
time gave into my possession the keys of these papers and 
of his wife's jewels, which keys I had never up till that time 
used except on occasions when they were lent to me by him 
for some specific purpose. My uncle John A. Carlyle the 
same day spoke of this gift of a thousand pounds. He spoke 
of it as being in his opinion a small provision, but he added : 
" Your uncle has also given you all the things in the house 
which he has bequeathed to me by his Will. I quite approve 
of his doing so and I renounce all claim upon them." He 
again in the evening spoke of the gift of these things in the 
house in the hearing of my uncle Thomas Carlyle. I 
received no other keys from my uncle at this time. About 
three months later, on the occasion of my return with my 
uncle Thomas Carlyle to Cheyne Row after a visit into 
Kent, our old housekeeper Mrs. Warren having left us, I 
received from my uncle I think all the keys of the house 
with the exception of the keys of the secretaire and writing- 
desk mentioned above as containing his private business 
papers and other personal property. 

The papers of which my uncle gave me possession for 
myself on the 30th of June, 1875, were then some of them 
in two cupboards in the room which had formerly been his 
study and some of them in a pedestal chest of drawers in 
the drawing-room. The jewelry, which he considered very 
valuable (in it were the brooch, bracelet and chain which 
had been sent to my aunt by Goethe), was contained in two 

144 



APPENDIX 

jewel boxes which were locked in an old chest of drawers on 
the landing outside his bedroom door. 

From this date (June, 1875) my uncle never dealt with 
any of these things wltTiout consulting me and I regarded 
them as mine and dealt with them openly as such in the 
following instances: — 

1. I wore the jewelry with my uncle's knowledge 
and approval. 

2. I gave away as mementoes of my aunt a gold 
compass and a vinaigrette, without asking my uncle's 
permission. 

3. In November, 1876, I sent to Mr. Allingham, 
then editor of Erasers Magazine^ a. translation from 
Goethe which was amongst the papers given to me 
which Mr. Allingham wished to publish, but, ultimately, 
I decided not to have it published because I was unable 
to write any introduction to it which appeared to me 
satisfactory. I consulted my uncle about the introduc- 
tion but not about whether the MS. should be published 
or not. This my uncle treated as entirely my affair. 

4. About this time my uncle told me that Mr. 
Allingham had spoken to him concerning certain unpub- 
lished articles by my uncle which I had lent him to read. 
My uncle had expressed to Mr. Allingham his willing- 
ness that one of these — an account of a tour in the 
Netherlands — should be printed in Frasers Magazine ; 
but my uncle said he had told Mr. Allingham that the 
articles which I had lent him to read were mine and 
he must consult with me. Mr. Allingham accordingly 
asked my consent to publish some of these articles 
(amongst them the account of a tour in the Nether- 
lands) along with the materials for my uncle's biography 
which are now in Mr. Froude's hands. 

5. When my uncle complied with a request for his 
autograph before 1875, when he gave his MSS. to me, 
he often used a piece of an old MS. for the donee. 

10 14s 



APPENDIX 

After 1875 he never did so, but wrote his name instead. 
I, on the other hand, when asked for an autograph 
sometimes used his old MSS. without consulting my 
uncle, as I did (i) in the autumn of 1876 for Mrs. 
Annabella Anstruther of Old Ballikinrain, to whom I 
gave a paper written ^by my uncle on a new mode of 
roughing horses which was amongst the papers my 
uncle had given me. (2) In 1877 or 1878 for Mrs. 
Hartpole Lecky a MS. which, if I remember rightly, 
formed part of my uncle's MS. of " Frederick II." Mrs. 
Lecky asked me on this occasion, " Ought I not to apply 
to Mr. Carlyle for it ? " and I replied, " No, his MSS. are 
all mine." (3) In 1878 and 1879, without consulting 
my uncle, I cut from the MSS. he had given me the 
names in his handwriting of several personages {e.g., 
Frederick Wilhelm, Marie Th^r^se, Maupertuis), of 
whom we had portraits, and affixed them to the portraits 
where my uncle frequently saw them without objection. 

6. I had two letters of Thackeray and also a poem 
of Goethe framed separately and hung up in my own 
room, and I put a paper of my uncle into my scrap-book. 
These I took out of the cupboard referred to. My 
uncle often saw them and treated the appropriation as 
proper. 

7. In 1 877, after some communications between my 
uncle and Mr. Froude as to a biography of my uncle, 
my uncle asked me to send Mr. Froude such of the 
papers as I thought would be useful for that purpose, 
but told me distinctly that he had taken care I should 
have them all back again. I was then, as always, anx- 
ious to carry out every wish of my uncle, and I accord- 
ingly sent almost all the papers I had, but I might have 
retained all if I had desired. I left the selection to Mr. 
Froude of my own free will and without my uncle's 
knowledge. 

8. On the 17th April, 1880, I opened one of the 
drawers in the pedestal chest in the drawing-room to 

146 



APPENDIX 

look for a paper. The drawer contained unpublished 
articles of my uncle on various subjects (articles, there 
to this day, on Modern Science, Fenianism, Trades 
Unions, Skirving, etc., etc.). It was dark, and I took 
out the drawer and carried it to the lamp beside which 
my uncle and my husband were reading. On turning 
over these papers I came upon a letter from Disraeli to 
my uncle and a copy of his answer to it. I said : " There 
is Dizzy's letter offering to make you a Grand Knight 
of the Bath. Shall we show it to Alick ? " (my husband, 
who was sitting by). He answered, glancing into the 
drawer, " They are all your own, you may do what you 
like with them." From this drawer I took out an 
article on Wilson (Christopher North), sent it to Mr. 
Froude, and it is now in Mr. Froude's hands amongst 
the papers claimed by me. 

The following is an instance of a gift made to me by my 
uncle similar to the gift of the papers where I acted without 
question as absolute owner i7ipresenti. In February, 1876, 
my uncle, Thomas Carlyle, gave me the watch, chain, and 
the seals which had belonged to Charles Dickens, and which 
were bequeathed to my uncle by the late John Forster. I 
gave away the watch, the chain, and the seals in my uncle's 
lifetime without asking his permission. 

I never in my uncle's lifetime had any misunderstanding 
with Mr. Froude, who was at all times kind and courteous to 
me. I was satisfied by my uncle's frequent assurance that 
Mr. Froude understood the papers to be mine. I very sel- 
dom spoke of them as mine simply out of delicacy, not wish- 
ing to seem greedy about property which I knew my uncle 
had given to me as an immediate and present gift, not post- 
poned until his death but yet in prospect of that event. My 
uncle during many years spoke of his death as near at hand. 
I considered the papers referred to as very precious, but I 
never thought of them as valuable in point of money until, 
as presently mentioned, Mr. Froude arranged with me to 

147 



APPENDIX 

hold the proceeds of the "Reminiscences" for me. The 
only occasions upon which Mr. Froude used words which led 
me to think that he did not clearly understand all the papers 
were mine were those referred to in the correspondence of 
February, 1880. 

On February 16, 1879, Mr. Froude brought Mr. Bret 
Harte, who was staying with him, to visit my uncle in Cheyne 
Row. Before lunch, while Mr. Bret Harte was talking with 
my uncle, Mr. Froude said to me (referring to my present 
husband's father) : " Your uncle Alick wrote the best letters 
in the family. They are very interesting and I am going to 
give them to you." I replied : " Oh ! you are going to send 
me all of them ; they are all mine." After Mr. Froude and 
Mr, Bret Harte had left, it occurred to me to make sure 
there should be no mistake about the return of the papers to 
me. I therefore said to my uncle I was sorry I had sent so 
many of the papers to Mr. Froude and wondered if Mr. 
Froude understood they were to be all returned to me. My 
uncle replied, " Froude perfectly understands that, for I have 
often said so to him." I expressed a wish that my uncle 
would speak to Mr. Froude again on the subject so as to 
prevent any misapprehension, which he promised to do. 
Mr. Froude used to come to our house twice a week, Tues- 
days and Fridays, to walk and latterly to drive out with my 
uncle. On the Tuesday following the Sunday upon which 
the above-mentioned conversation took place my uncle drove 
out with Mr. Froude in a hansom cab. After the drive and 
after Mr. Froude had left, my uncle said to me : " Froude 
perfectly understands the papers are yours and will return 
them all to you. He has promised to do so." 

In February, 1880, Mr. Froude again spoke of returning 
Mr. Alexander Carlyle's letters. This to me revived my 
fear lest he might not return the others. I therefore again 
raised the subject with my uncle in February, 1880. He 
said to me : " Froude understands beyond any kind of doubt 
that they are yours — it is no use bothering him again." But 
I persisted, and he promised me to speak to Mr. Froude 

148 



APPENDIX 

about it again for the purpose of insuring that the papers 
should be returned to me as soon as Mr. Froude had done 
with them. 

Mr. Froude's letter to me of loth February, 1880, which 
I showed to my uncle, satisfied both my uncle and myself 
that no further question would be raised on the subject. 
" That I was to have," as Mr. Froude there said, " the entire 
collection when he had done with it," appeared to me all I 
wanted. 

The occasion upon which the monetary value of the 
papers was first discussed was shortly after Mr. Froude's 
letter to my uncle of 23rd September, 1879. 

On the 20th of November, 1 879, my husband and I dined 
with Mr. Froude at his residence, Mr. Froude's son, Mr. 
Ashley Froude, and his daughter. Miss Margaret Froude, 
being present. On this occasion Mr. Froude distinctly 
stated that he would hold the whole proceeds of the " Remi- 
niscences " for me. This promise was frequently repeated 
by Mr. Froude, who, on one occasion, a month before my 
uncle's death, in the presence of my husband, added : " The 
book was written by your uncle, not by me, and therefore 
there would be no propriety in my receiving the money for 
it. But of course it will be different with the Biography 
which I shall write myself." My husband and I both assented 
to this, and looked upon it as settled. My uncle was 
informed of this arrangement on the 20th of November, 
1 879, by myself and my husband, and subsequently by Mr. 
Froude, and expressed his approval of it as natural and 
proper, so that we regarded it as a settled thing. 

After this arrangement had been made, and possibly to 
some extent influenced by it, I sent Mr. Froude, for use and 
return to me, further papers which my uncle had given me, 
especially the letters of my uncle, Thomas Carlyle, to his 
brother. Dr. John Carlyle, a very large collection of which, 
extending over sixty years, were returned to my uncle, 
Thomas Carlyle, by Dr. Carlyle's executor a few months 
after the death of Dr. Carlyle in September, 1879. These 

149 



APPENDIX 

my uncle, Thomas Carlyle, gave me for my own as soon as 
he received them, and I, at his wish, lent them to Mr. 
Froude, relying on his promise to restore all the papers to 
me when used for the purpose of the Biography. 

On the 2ist of February, 1881, the will and codicil of my 
uncle were read by Mr. Ouvry in the presence of Sir J. F. 
Stephen and myself and my husband, but Mr. Froude was 
not present. Immediately after the will was read Sir J. 
Stephen said, " There is too the question of the papers." I 
answered : " Yes ; Froude has no right to say what he said in 
the Times, he has no right to burn them ; the papers are 
mine." Sir James Stephen said : " Do you mean to say that 
you want a share in the profits .? " I said, " No; but Froude 
is to return all the papers to me ; he has promised to do so," 
and thereupon I showed Sir James Stephen Mr. Froude's 
letter of loth February, 1 880. Mr. Ouvry then said : " There 
is too the question of the ' Reminiscences ' ; I think Mrs. 
Carlyle was to have the profits of that book." I said, " Yes ; 
Mr. Froude has promised them to me." Sir James Stephen 
then said that what I had said was entirely satisfactory, and 
proposed that it should be reduced by him to writing. 

I was at the time extremely tired ; I had not thought the 
matter over nor taken either professional advice or that of 
my husband, and was in consequence not at all in a fit state 
to transact business; but alarmed by what I had heard 
shortly before, that the whole matter might have to be 
thrown into Chancery, I consented to Sir James Stephen's 
suggestion. Sir James Stephen then drew up a memoran- 
dum, which differed from that which afterwards passed in 
this, that it was said that the papers were given " by Mr. 
Carlyle " instead of simply given, and that all the words after 
"the use to be made of these papers" were wanting. I 
objected to this, saying the papers were sent by me, not by 
my uncle, and I strongly protested that Mr. Froude had no 
right to burn any of the papers. Thereupon Sir James 
Stephen asked whether I thought that practically he would 
burn any of them, and pressed me as to whether I had not 

150 



APPENDIX 

sent the MSS. ^j/ order of my uncle, but I persisted this was 
not so. Sir James Stephen then tore up the first memoran- 
dum and wrote another, leaving out after given the words 
" by Mr. Carlyle " and adding the words at the end, " On the 
other hand Mrs. A. Carlyle," etc., as the paragraph now 
stands. 

I agreed to the memorandum in this form, understanding 
by it that I was to have the entire collection of the MSS. 
with the profits of the " Reminiscences," Mr. Froude having 
the profits of the Biography. 

It was only in this sense that the memorandum expressed 
what I understood. 

The parol evidence which was collected in support of the 
gift to Mrs. Alexander Carlyle of her uncle's papers is next 
given. 

Alexander Carlyle. 

I am a nephew of the late Mr. Thomas Carlyle, a son of 
his brother Alexander. I married my cousin, then Miss 
Mary Carlyle Aitken, on the 21st of August, 1879. After 
our marriage we continued to live at Cheyne Row and to 
have the care of Mr. Carlyle, as my wife had before our 
marriage. We still live at Cheyne Row. I came to Eng- 
land from Canada in July, 1879, and therefore know nothing 
of the manuscripts of my late uncle before that date. After 
coming to England I heard from my wife that my uncle had 
given her his MSS. I was present at and remember the 
following occasion upon which my uncle spoke of the MSS. 
as the property of my wife : — 

On the 17th of April, 1880, I was reading with my uncle 
in the drawing-room at Cheyne Row, and my wife was 
searching through one of the drawers of a pedestal chest of 
drawers in the drawing-room full of his MSS. My wife 
brought the drawer to the lamp, beside which my uncle and 
I were reading, and taking out a letter from Disraeli to my 
uncle and a copy of his reply to it, my wife said to my uncle, 

151 



APPENDIX 

"There is Dizzy's letter offering to make you a G.C.B. 
Shall we show it to Alick?" — meaning me. My uncle 
glanced in the drawer and replied to my wife : " They are 
all your own ; you may do what you like with them." I 
confirm the account given by my wife (in her proof which I 
have read) of the interview with Sir James Stephen and Mr. 
Ouvry on the 21st of February, 1881, after the will was read. 

Mrs. Jane Carlyle Aitken. 

I was the sister of the late Thomas Carlyle and John 
Aitken Carlyle, and am the mother of Mrs. A. Carlyle, who 
resided with my brother Thomas. My brother Dr. John 
Carlyle has frequently said to me that the things in the 
house at Cheyne Row were left to him by the will of my 
brother Thomas, but were my daughter Mary's. The last 
occasion upon which he did so was in the spring of 1 878 at 
our house. The Hill, Dumfries, after his return home from 
Cheyne Row. We were speaking of our brother Thomas's 
failing health. My brother John said to me : " Mary has a 
heavy task and does it well; her uncle has left her ;^500." 
I remarked that " it was a limited provision in the circum- 
stances if one had been studying that." My brother replied, 
" Yes, but Tom and I have arranged that all the things in 
the house which have been left to me are Mary's." 

Miss Ann Aitken. 

I am the sister of Mrs. A. Carlyle. I resided for many 
years in the same house with my uncle, Dr. John A. Carlyle. 
On one occasion, about May, 1878, my uncle John said to 
me, referring to my uncle Thomas, " Your uncle has left all 
the things in his house to me, but they are Mary's." By 
" Mary " he intended my sister, now Mrs. A. Carlyle. I am 
quite sure he used the words "are Mary's." He did not 
particularise the things in the house. On the same occasion 
my uncle John told me it had been agreed between him and 

15.2 



APPENDIX 

my uncle Thomas that what my uncle Thomas had by his 
will left to my uncle John should be my sister Mary's. 

Mr. W. Allingham. Late Editor of Erasers Magazine. 
{Extract from a letter written by Witness^ 

Towards the end of 1876 I had some talk with Mr. Carlyle 
about publishing papers of his in Eraser's Magazine, of which 
I was then the Editor. He referred the matter to Miss 
Mary Aitken, who sent me several MSS. to examine, part 
of which I was very desirous to have for publication. But 
on going to Cheyne Row some days afterwards I found that 
Miss Aitken had changed her mind and would not allow the 
articles to be published by Longman. I argued a little 
against this, but she persisted in her opinion, and Carlyle 
left the matter in her hands, so I returned all the MSS. to 
her and said no more about it. 

Paul Frederick Friedmann, Esq., of the Bottom. 

I was a friend of the late Mr. Thomas Carlyle, with whom 
I frequently went out driving. On one of the last occasions 
that I went out with Mr, Carlyle we spoke of Victor Hugo. 
I mentioned Goethe's expression about Hugo's plays — 
"bloody marionettes." Carlyle laughed and told me that 
Goethe had written to him, saying of Hugo's works, " Von 
dieser Litteratnr bitte ich sich fern zu haltcn^^ ("of this 
literature I pray to keep aloof"), or very nearly such words. 
I asked him if he had many letters of Goethe ; he said, " Yes, 
a good many." I said they must be very interesting and 
asked what he had done with them, if he had given them to 
Lewes for Goethe's Life. He said, " Oh, no, Mary has them 
all," and either added, " I have given them all to her " or 
"They are all hers," or words to that effect, from which 
I clearly understood that they were actually her property. I 
said I hoped Miss Aitken would publish them some day. 
He said, " Oh, yes, when I am gone," or nearly such words. 
We afterwards spoke of Lewes, George Eliot, Thackeray. 

153 



APPENDIX 

I inferred from Carlyle's words that what I had heard of 
his having given all his papers to Miss Aitken was true and 
forbore asking him (as I had otherwise intended) for a book 
Goethe had given him. I had been reminded of this book 
when he told me of the letters and had therefore intention- 
ally brought the conversation to the point where he told me 
that the letters were Miss Aitken's. We did not speak of 
his books nor as far as I remember of his manuscripts in 
general. I remember no other conversation with Carlyle 
about his manuscripts. I have never seen the letters of 
Goethe and do not know whether the passage really occurs 
in them. I cannot swear to any exact words, but I have a 
distinct recollection of the conversation and that I clearly 
understood Thomas Carlyle to say that the letters of Goethe 
belonged to Miss Aitken. I am quite certain that he did 
not say that they would be hers. 

Mrs. E. a. Venturi, Sister-in-law of Mr. Stansfeld, M.P. 

I was a friend of the late Mr. Thomas Carlyle. I remem- 
ber talking with him shortly after Mazzini's death in 1 872 
upon the question of one's responsibility with regard to 
private letters of friends and telling him that it was Mazzini's 
habit to burn all intimate letters as soon as possible after 
receipt of them. He appeared to approve of this, in Maz- 
zini's case, but to my surprise not as a general rule. I dis- 
tinctly remember that he told me that he had not adopted 
this practice and added that it could lead to no mischief as 
all his letters and papers would " ultimately " come to Miss 
Aitken. On a later occasion, probably before 1877, Miss 
Aitken, sitting beside her uncle Thomas Carlyle with her 
hand on his knee, told me, in his presence and hearing, that 
he (Miss Aitken called him " Bester ") had given her all his 
letters and papers. He appeared to me to entirely accept 
what Miss Aitken said, but I do not remember that he made 
any remark. 

154 



APPENDIX 



Mrs. Annabella A. Anstruther, of Cassillis House, Ayr. 

I was a friend of the late Mr. Thomas Carlyle. In the 
summer or autumn of 1876 Miss Aitken made me a present 
from herself of the following papers : — 

1. A MS. of Carlyle on a method of roughing 
horses. 

2. Another MS. of Carlyle beginning " But how is 
the artist to guard himself from the corruptions of his 
time 1 " 

3. Another small piece in blue pencil. 

4. A separate autograph and several photographs 
of Carlyle, his wife and his mother. 

Afterwards, whilst Carlyle was staying on a visit with us 
at Old Ballikinrain, I mentioned the gift to him. He ap- 
peared to me to approve of the gift as a gift from his niece, 
not from himself. One of his expressions was, '* Mary has 
plenty more of that rubbish," meaning his handwriting. 
The impression I received from the conversation was that 
Miss Aitken had entire control of her uncle's papers. 

These statements, accompanied by a narrative of Mrs. 
Alexander Carlyle's case and the whole of the correspondence 
to date, including the communications with Sir James 
Stephen which were entered upon for the express purpose 
of interchanging without reserve all that could be said on 
either side for or against the respective claims of Mrs. 
Alexander Carlyle, Froude and Carlyle's executors and also 
the Case presently mentioned which was drafted by Sir 
James Stephen on behalf of Carlyle's executors, and the 
opinion of Mr. Vaughan Hawkins upon it, were submitted 
by Messrs. Benson in July, 1881, to Mr. Cozens-Hardy, 
who was asked to advise in response to the following 
questions : — 

155 



APPENDIX 



Questions submitted to Mr. Cozens-Hardy. 

" What are the respective rights of Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, 
Mr. Froude, Carlyle' s executors, and others in relation to — 

" First, the ownership of the MSS., letters, family 
papers and materials generally ; 

" Secondly, the right of publication, and the use of 
the material for that purpose ; 

" Thirdly, the copyright and profits, and generally 
what course Mrs. Alexander Carlyle is entitled to take 
to secure what she considers due to her uncle's memory 
and the benefits he intended for her ? " 

Mr. Cozens-Hardy's Opinion:^ 

%thjuly, 1 88 1. 

1 . Prima facie the right to the manuscript letters 
and family papers vests in the executors of the late 
Thomas Carlyle. I think, however that there is good 
ground for contending that the ownership of these 
documents is not vested in the executors, but is vested 
in Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, to whom they were given by 
her uncle in June, 1875. It appears from the accompa- 
nying Statements that what took place amounted to an 
immediate present gift, as distinguished from an inten- 
tion to give, and moreover that the fact of such a gift 
was repeatedly acknowledged by Mr. Carlyle in a manner 
which will supply that corroboration which is necessary 
to support Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's claim. This being 
so, I think that Mrs. Carlyle is entitled to claim the 
documents from Mr. Froude or from the executors. In 
saying this, I do not of course intend to say that Mr. 
Froude may not use for the purpose of the Biography 
the letters which were lent to him by Mrs. Carlyle for 
that express purpose. 

2. I think that the right of publication passes with 

156 



APPENDIX 

the ownership of the letters and other papers, except so 
far as the writers of any letters addressed to Mr. Carlyle 
or their legal personal representatives may interfere by 
injunction to restrain the publication. 

3. I think that the copyright and the profits to be 
derived from the publication will also belong to Mrs. 
Carlyle, subject, however, to this qualification. Mrs. 
Carlyle permitted Mr. Froude to have the documents 
and to publish part of them in the volumes of " Remi- 
niscences " ; and I am not prepared to say that she can 
as of right prevent the republication of the " Reminis- 
cences." It seems that in 1879, before the publication 
was resolved upon or finally authorised, Mr. Froude 
agreed that all the profits to be derived from that publi- 
cation should belong to Mrs. Carlyle. See his letters 
of the 2ist and 23rd February, 1881. But I understand 
that Mrs. Carlyle has agreed to allow Mr. Froude to 
retain ;^300 out of the profits arising from the sale of 
the " Reminiscences," and that Mr. Froude has assented 
to this and agrees to assign the copyright to her. 
Herbert H. Cozens-Hardy, 

7, New Square, Lincoln's Inn. 

Whilst the case upon which this opinion was given was 
being drafted, Mrs. Alexander Carlyle heard that Sir James 
Stephen in consultation with Froude was also drafting a case 
on the part of Carlyle's executors for the opinion of Mr. 
Vaughan Hawkins as to the claims of the executors on 
behalf of the residuary legatees. Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, 
therefore, desired Messrs. Benson to send to Sir James 
Stephen the first draft of the case which they were preparing 
on her behalf for the double purpose of helping Sir James 
Stephen to state the facts correctly and of obtaining from 
him, for Mr. Cozens-Hardy's consideration, all that either 
he or Froude could urge against her claims. 

Early in June, 1881, Messrs. Benson sent Mrs. Alexander 
Carlyle's case, so far as it was then drafted, to Sir James 

157 



APPENDIX 

Stephen without the Statements above set out, which, not 
being then complete, were reserved for later communication, 
and at his request authorised him to communicate the draft 
case to Mr. Ouvry and Froude, asking Sir James Stephen, 
however, to treat it as " still imperfect and therefore sus- 
ceptible without comment of any corrections which further 
consideration or research might render necessary." 

Meantime, without waiting for the assistance which, in 
stating the facts for Mr. Vaughan Hawkins' opinion, he 
might have obtained by communication with Mrs. Alexander 
Carlyle's solicitors, Sir James Stephen had, on the 13th of 
May, 1 881, obtained Mr. Vaughan Hawkins' opinion in favour 
of the executors' claims to the papers, upon a statement 
which is not merely imperfect in many important particulars, 
but, in some, opposed to the facts as we now know them. 

Upon the statement submitted to him, Mr. Vaughan 
Hawkins' advice could not have been other than it was, but 
his opinion was without value, because he was not furnished 
with the Statements given above which were submitted to 
Mr. Cozens-Hardy with the corroborative letters from which 
many quotations have already been made. 

Nevertheless, Mr. Vaughan Hawkins' opinion, as well as 
the letters of Sir James Stephen, expressing his own views, 
were submitted to and considered by Mr. Cozens-Hardy 
before he wrote his opinion. 

On the 28th of June, 1881, Messrs, Benson sent to Sir 
James Stephen a copy of the above-mentioned Statements, 
in support of the gift of the papers to Mrs. Alexander 
Carlyle in 1875, suggesting that they would influence the 
opinion he had expressed adverse to this gift, and adding, 
"The case is not a party and party statement but comprises 
all the materials we have been able to gather, whichever way 
they tell." 

On the 5th of July, 1881, Sir James Stephen replied that 
the new matter had " not weakened, but confirmed " the 
opinion expressed in his letter of the lOth of June, 1881, 
and, after giving his reasons for doubting the accuracy of 

158 



APPENDIX 

Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's account of her uncle's gift to her 
and saying that he saw no reason to disbelieve Froude's 
statement as to the authority given to him to burn the letters 
and papers, he proceeded as follows : — 

" No doubt the language of Mr. Froude's letters to the 
Tunes favours Mrs. Carlyle's claim, but what he wrote in 
1 88 1 cannot alter the legal effect of things said and done 
years before, and, it must be remembered, that he has always 
admitted that Mr. Carlyle desired him to return all the 
papers to Mrs. Carlyle when he had done with them. On 
the other hand, he has the papers and primd facie they 
are his. 

" The claim of the executors on behalf of the estate is free 
from the difficulty which always attends claims found on 
recollections of conversations to which there is only one 
living witness and which took place (if at all) several years 
before the claim is decided, but our claim is open to this 
remark, its enforcement would do no good to anyone and 
would certainly defeat Mr. Carlyle's intentions both by 
depriving Mrs. Carlyle of the profits of the 'Reminiscences' 
and by hampering Mr. Froude (to an extent which depends 
on the determination of an entirely new and doubtful point 
of law) in making use of the papers for biographical 
purposes. 

" The result is that in every view of the case a settlement 
appears advisable, and I earnestly recommend the parties 
concerned to adopt either the terms which I proposed in my 
last letter \i.e., the letter of loth June, 1881, above referred 
to] or some modification of them. I should be much sur- 
prised if Mr. Cozens-Hardy, or any independent person 
whose opinion may be taken on the subject, did not recognise 
the force of these observations." 

Messrs. Benson replied on the 20th of July, 1881, inclosing 
a copy of Mr. Cozens-Hardy's opinion, and after dealing 
with the reasons given by Sir James Stephen for doubting 
the accuracy of Mrs. Alexander Carlyle's statement, they 

159 



APPENDIX 

expressed as follows her response to the suggestions made 
by Sir James Stephen in his letter of the loth of June : — 

" We are desired to state at the outset that Mrs. Carlyle 
declines to receive the proceeds of the ' Reminiscences ' as a 
gift from Mr. Froude, but claims them in accordance with 
Mr. Cozens-Hardy's opinion as a right for the origin of which 
she will be indebted to her uncle and not to Mr. Froude, but 
we do not think a difference of opinion on this point between 
Mrs. Carlyle and Mr. Froude ought to affect any amicable 
arrangement which might otherwise be made. 

" Having made this statement, we are instructed that Mrs. 
Carlyle is willing that a friendly settlement should be effected 
on the following terms : — 

" I . Mr. Froude at once to act upon his letter to 
the Times of 9th May, 1881, and deliver all the papers 
to Mrs. Carlyle. 

"2. The executors to sanction this delivery upon 
having either the written consent of the residuary lega- 
tees or a substantial and approved indemnity (which we 
believe we are in a position to offer) against any claim 
which may be made by any residuary legatee, whose 
written consent is not obtained, against the executors in 
respect of the papers so delivered. 

" 3. Mr. Froude to give up all claim to any further 
use of or profit from the papers so delivered, which Mrs. 
Carlyle will treat as given to her by her uncle in his 
lifetime. 

" 4. On the other hand, Mrs. Carlyle to give up the 
whole profits, present and future, as well as the copy- 
right, of the 'Reminiscences,' so that as far as Mrs. 
Carlyle is concerned, Mr. Froude will at once receive 
for his own benefit ;^ 1,500 now in hand from this source." 

Further correspondence took place, in the course of which 
there was a practical recognition of the justice of Mrs. 
Alexander Carlyle' s claim by Sir James Stephen, for on the 

160 



APPENDIX 

19th of August, 1 881, Messrs. Farrer, Ouvry & Co. wrote to 
Messrs. Benson in these terms : " We send you a copy of a 
letter that has been addressed to Mr. Froude, and Sir Fitz- 
James Stephen, who has sent it to us, points out that Mrs. 
A. Carlyle^ by giving the papers to Mr. Froude under the 
circumstances as stated by herself^ has induced him to bestow 
several years of great labour upon them, and thus has prac- 
tically contracted with him that he should write the life of 
the late Mr. Carlyle, using the papers as his materials." 

To this Messrs. Benson replied that "Mrs. Alexander 
Carlyle, without entirely concurring with Sir James Stephen 
as to the extent of Mr. Froude's labours, has so far recog- 
nised the justice of the view expressed by him as to provide 
for the payment of a very considerable sum [the whole 
profits of the ' Reminiscences,' in respect of which ^^1,500 
was in hand] to Mr. Froude as part of the proposed compro- 
mise." 

In September, 1881, a long conference took place between 
Sir James Stephen and Dr. Benson at the office of Messrs. 
Farrer, Ouvry & Co. with a view to an amicable arrange- 
ment, but immediately after that conference Sir James Ste- 
phen addressed a letter to Mr. Farrer, to be forwarded to 
Dr. Benson, in which the following passages occurred : — 

" I am not quite sure whether in the course of my conver- 
sation with Mr. Benson I made one point clear, nam el v, that 
if matters came to an extremity, Mr. Froude will not admit 
his liability, either legal or moral, to give Mrs. Carlyle any 
part of the proceeds of the 'Reminiscences.' He is, and 
always has been, willing to make over the amount, less ;;^300, 
to her, if sJie will accept it as a present from him. For the 
sake of peace he is willing that the amount, less ;^300, shall 
be accepted by her without any statement being made as to 
her title to it, but if she rejects the money as a i^resent and 
sues him for the papers and the ;^ 1,500, Jie will stand on his 
rights and refuse to give her anything at all except what the 
law compels him to give, and he would take up this position 
whether the tribunal chosen was a court of law or an arbi- 
II 161 



APPENDIX 

trator. . . . Will you kindly send Mr. Benson a copy of 
this ? I hope he will allow me to congratulate him on the 
good feeling and gentlemanlike manner which he showed in 
a matter which required much delicacy and also on his firm- 
ness and acuteness in respect of his client's interests. I 
may just add that I am quite convinced that Mr. Froude will 
not give way on the subject of writing Mr. Carlyle's Life. 
He feels that it would be injurious and humiliating to him to 
do so, and I entirely agree with him." 

Strange doctrine to fall from the pen of a nineteenth- 
century jurist ! True, says Sir James Stephen in effect, in 
his letter to Messrs. Benson, of loth June, 1881, Carlyle in- 
tended his manuscripts for his niece. True, he added in his 
letter of the 5th July following, a claim to them by his 
executors would defeat his intentions and do no good to any 
one. True, going back to his letter of the loth June, Carlyle 
died in the faith of Froude' s engagement, that his niece who 
solaced his declining years should have the profits of the 
" Reminiscences," and duc for this faith would probably have 
made better provision for her ; and yet ! Unless Mrs. Alex- 
ander Carlyle will humble herself to accept as a present from 
Froude, on whom she had no claim, what she owed to her 
uncle; unless she will deny Froude's own statement that the 
" Reminiscences " were written by her uncle, and that there 
would be no propriety in his receiving the profits of them, 
and confess that on the contrary the profits are his, and that 
only his generosity and not his engagement with her uncle 
and herself can make them hers ; unless she will do all this, 
then Froude will take advantage, and will be morally entitled 
to take advantage, and Carlyle's executors will help him to 
take advantage and will be morally entitled to do so, of the 
flaw in her legal title which Mr. Cozens-Hardy denied, but 
upon which Sir James Stephen insisted, to defeat Carlyle's 
intentions, and to deprive his niece of part of the provision 
made for her. 

According to Sir James Stephen's letters of loth June and 
5th July, Carlyle's intentions and Froude's undertakings to 

162 



APPENDIX 

give effect to them are beyond question, and only the claims 
of the executors and residuary legatees stand in the way. 
In September the claims of the executors and residuary 
legatees, which were never serious, have disappeared, and it 
is Froude who is to keep both papers and profits, unless 
Mrs. Alexander Carlyle will solicit his bounty. Froude's 
liability to fulfil his admitted engagement with Carlyle and 
his niece is acknowledged, only so long as Mrs. Alexander 
Carlyle refrains from asserting it. A moral debt is wiped 
out when the creditor insists on its payment ! 

Messrs. Benson replied to Sir James Stephen's letter by 
a letter to Messrs. Farrer, Ouvry & Co., which we give in 
full, as it is a clear and comprehensive statement of Mrs. 
Alexander Carlyle' s case: — 

I, Clement's Inn, 

%th October, 1881. 

Dear Sirs, — 

We have your letter of the 20th of September, enclosing 
a copy of Sir James Stephen's letter to you which he wished 
us to see. 

We are unwilling to prolong controversy on minor issues 
which may tend rather to obscure and complicate than clear 
the main issue, but we cannot leave Mr. Froude's view of 
his moral obligations as now expressed by Sir James Stephen 
on record in writing without similarly recording Mrs. Car- 
lyle's reply. 

We are dealing for the moment only with the moral aspect 
of a mixed question of law and morals. 

We say that from this point of view the mode of settle- 
ment proposed by Mr. Froude involves no concession what- 
ever on his part. 

We understand Sir James Stephen to suggest that a vol- 
untary gift is revocable on breach of an implied condition 
that its recipient shall expressly admit its voluntary charac- 
ter, and that Mr. Froude's obligations in respect both of the 
profits of the " Reminiscences " and of the disposition of the 

163 



APPENDIX 

materials for the " Biography " were in their origin voluntary 
gifts. 

We venture to doubt the major premiss. 

Mr. Froude has emphatically denied the minor. 

We purposely refrain from discussing the legal aspect of 
the question involved in the minor premiss, but we ask Sir 
James Stephen to consider what view Mr. Froude was 
morally bound to take of that question and the view he 
actually took. 

First as regards the profits of the " Reminiscences." This 
part of the question has been simplified by the arrangement 
that Mr. Froude shall retain ;^300 in respect of his editorial 
labour and the extra profit consequent upon the addition of 
" Jane Welsh Carlyle " to the book. 

In speaking of the profits of the " Reminiscences " there- 
fore, we mean the profits less ;^300, and we omit to take 
further account of the matters In respect of which this de- 
duction was arranged. What remains is to inquire whether 
Mr. Froude as a man of strict and sensitive honour might 
have retained for his own use the profits derived from the 
publication for Mr. Carlyle of a work written by Mr. Carlyle. 
Mr. Froude thought not and said so. Here are his own words 
to Mr. and Mrs. A. Carlyle a month before the death of Mr. 
Thomas Carlyle: "The book was written by your uncle, 
not by me, and there would be no propriety in my receiving 
the money for it." But this is not all. Whether Mr. 
Froude might have retained the profits of the "Reminis- 
cences " with propriety or not, he arranged with Mr. Thomas 
Carlyle in his lifetime that he would not do so, but would 
treat them in accordance with Mr. Carlyle' s wishes on the 
subject as belonging to Mrs. A. Carlyle, and Mr. Thomas 
Carlyle died in the belief that these profits were part of the 
provision he had made for his niece. See the published 
correspondence between Messrs. Scribner and Messrs. 
Harper of New York. See also Mr. Froude's letters to 
Mrs. A. Carlyle dated 21 February, 1881, and 23 February, 
1881. 

164 



APPENDIX 

In the former Mr. Froude says, " Of course you shall have 
every farthing that comes from the ' Reminiscences,' and I 
appeal to your good sense to acquit me of having attempted 
to go back from an engagement." 

In the latter Mr, Froude warmly apologises for a confused 
memory having " led me to believe that I was free to ar- 
range the details over again." 

See also the Agreement on the subject between Mrs. A. 
Carlyle and Mr. Froude effected by Sir James Stephen and 
contamed in Mrs. Carlyle's letter to him dated 27 February, 
1 881, and his reply of the same date. This would seem to 
include the assent of the Executors independently of their 
present willingness not to interfere with any arrangement 
which Mr. Froude may agree to on the subject. And finally 
we would refer in confirmation of our statements to the fact 
that in pursuance of this Agreement ;^ 1,500 has been actu- 
ally placed in trust for Mrs. Carlyle and the interest of this 
sum paid by the Trustee to her. 

Secondly, as regards the ultimate disposition of the mate- 
rials of the " Biography " after having been used by Mr. 
Froude for the purpose of the "Biography," it is even 
plainer if possible than in the case of the profits of the 
"Reminiscences" that Mr. Froude is under an obligation 
(whether legal or moral is not to the present purpose) to 
deliver them to Mrs. Carlyle, and has not now, whatever 
may have been the case originally, any right to destroy them. 

Here is Mr. Froude's language on the subject written to 
Mrs. A. Carlyle on the loth February, 1880, and shown to 
Mr. Thomas Carlyle a year before his death. " It has, how- 
ever, long been settled that you were to have the entire 
collection when I had done with it. Even if nothing had 
been arranged about it, I should of course have replaced it 
in your hands." 

Again, after Mr. Thomas Carlyle's death, Mr, Froude 
writes to Mrs, A. Carlyle under date i8th February, 1881: 
"His directions to me about the papers were originally 
emphatic — 'Do not spare the flame; the more you burn the 

165 



APPENDIX 

better.' It was not until the year before last that he desired 
me to return them to you when I had done with them," 
clearly implying that the directions to burn were cancelled 
by the subsequent instructions named. 

Again, in the Times of 25th February, 1881, Mr. Froude 
wrote, " The papers belong to his niece, Mrs. A. Carlyle, to 
whom he directed me to return them." 

We venture to think that with these considerations before 
him, Sir James Stephen will admit that Mr. Froude, as a 
man of sensitive honour, cannot now, and whatever course 
his dispute with Mrs. Carlyle may take, never could refuse 
to recognise his pledges in respect of the profits of the 
*' Reminiscences " and the ultimate disposition of the mate- 
rials for the " Biography " ; least of all on the ground that 
Mrs, Carlyle concurs in Mr. Froude's own estimate of the 
character of those pledges. 

If a friendly settlement should be come to involving the 
receipt by Mrs. Carlyle of the profits of the " Reminiscences " 
and the materials for the " Biography " without the with- 
drawal of the present contention on the part of Mr. Froude 
that such receipt is by his voluntary gift, the result would be 
a concession on the part, not of Mr. Froude, but of Mrs. 
Carlyle, and one which at present Mrs. Carlyle is unwilling 
to make. 

The only other concession which Sir James Stephen refers 
to does not proceed from Mr. Froude, but from the execu- 
tors. We do not attach much weight to the suggestion that 
the literary remains of Mr. Thomas Carlyle may be held to 
belong to the executors personally, especially if it is grounded 
upon the supposition of their having no intrinsic value, for 
we cannot doubt that if they were offered to the public as 
they stand there would be considerable competition for them. 
We presume the executors are taking, and will take, a 
reasonable view of their duty, having regard to the improba- 
bility of any claim on the part of the residuary legatees being 
made, and if made, sustained, and the indemnity against any 
such claim which the executors can have if they desire. 

166 



APPENDIX 

On the whole therefore, we shall be surprised if, on further 
consideration, Sir James Stephen does not agree with Mrs. 
Carlyle that she has good reason to expect the four advan- 
tages enumerated by him even in the event of an adverse 
decision upon any legal title which she may set up. 

Having thus recorded Mrs. Carlyle's reply to Mr. Froude's 
views, as expressed by Sir James Stephen on minor issues, 
we desire to impress upon Mr. Froude that on the main 
issue, namely, whether he is to act upon the offer publicly 
made in his own letter in the Times of 9th May, 1881, Mr. 
Froude has not as yet given any reason for not doing so 
which a man of sensitive honour could appreciate as adequate. 

Three reasons have been suggested : — 

1 . That Mr. Froude, though willing if not anxious 
to carry out this offer, was unable to do so because of 
a possible claim on the part of the Executors. This 
reason is no longer existent, as the Executors make no 
claim if Mr. Froude and Mrs. Carlyle agree. This was 
the only reason suggested during the period which 
elapsed between Mr. Froude's letter to the Times of the 
9th of May and your letter to us of the 19th August. 

2. The second reason suggested is that if Mr. 
Froude were to act upon his public offer he would 
remain unremunerated for considerable labour in respect 
of which he is entitled to expect remuneration. The 
answer is, Mrs. Carlyle will meet this objection by 
relinquishing in favour of Mr. Froude her right to the 
profits of the " Reminiscences," which at the present 
moment amount to upwards of ;£' 1,500 with more to 
come. 

3. The third reason suggested is that if Mr. Froude 
were to act upon his public offer it would place him in 
the humiliating position of bowing to an adverse public 
verdict (which however Mr. Froude does not admit to 
have been adverse) upon his literary taste as evinced by 
the publication of the " Reminiscences." 

167 



APPENDIX 

The answer is, first, that so far as the abandonment 
of the " Biography " is humiliating that humiHation has 
already been incurred by Mr. Froude's letter in the 
Times of 9th May, secondly, that it is much more 
humiliating to a man of sensitive honour to recede from 
a pledge to which, by publishing it in the Times, he has 
called upon the civilised world to bear witness. 

In conclusion we are desired to say that Mrs. Carlyle 
holds Mr. Froude to this pledge, recognising, however, his 
moral claim to compensation for literary labour lost, by 
relinquishing |in his favour her right to the profits of the 
" Reminiscences." 

Mrs. Carlyle will be glad to hear that Mr. Froude has been 
made personally acquainted with this expression of her views. 
We are. 

Yours faithfully, 

S. M. & J. B. Benson. 
Messrs. Farrer, Ouvry & Co. 

Further correspondence ensued, from which it appeared 
that Froude, supported by Sir James Stephen, was deter- 
mined to go on with his " Life of Carlyle," and declined even 
to discuss the matter with mutual friends of his and Mrs. 
Alexander Carlyle, such as Mr. Stansfeld or Professor 
Masson. It was to prevent him from writing the *' Life " 
that Mrs. Alexander Carlyle had striven, but she was advised 
that, having lent him the papers for that specific purpose, 
she could not insist on their return until that purpose was 
accomplished, and that Froude was not legally bound by his 
unconditional offer to return them at once, if he chose to 
stand confessed a promise-breaker in the sight of all men. 
She was therefore obliged helplessly to wait and watch with 
grief and indignation what she regarded as the profanation 
of her uncle's memory. 

Mrs. Alexander Carlyle claimed and received the profits 
of the " Reminiscences," less ';^300 which went to Froude, 

168 



APPENDIX 

not as a gift from Froude, but as a part of the provision her 
uncle had made for her, and ultimately, when the mischief 
of the " Life " was done, all the papers which Froude had 
claimed as his own and had maintained his right to burn 
were returned to her. These papers are preserved, and 
amongst them are many, still unpublished, of profound 
interest, which, when they appear, will help further to dis- 
close the great injustice done to Carlyle by Froude. 

II. 

Professor Charles Eliot Norton on Froude. 

In recent discussions on the Carlyle controversy nothing 
has been more remarkable than the entire ignorance of its 
origins and merits betrayed by some of those who have 
written about it, especially by those who have done so most 
dogmatically. This is no doubt owing to the fact that the 
Press is now largely manned by young men who knew not 
Thomas, or James Anthony, and who have not access to the 
crushing criticisms with which the writings of the latter 
about the former were received at the time of their appear- 
ance. Of these criticisms there were none more crushing, 
albeit gently and even gingerly applied, than those of Pro- 
fessor Charles Eliot Norton in his Edition of the " Reminis- 
cences" and of the "Early Letters" of Carlyle. These 
must ', have been peme forte et dure to Froude, but he 
endured them silently and no compurgators appeared. It 
is only now when the books containing them are only to be 
met with in some second-hand bookseller's shop, that an 
attempt is made in " My Relations with Carlyle " — a feeble 
and futile attempt — to answer one or two of the least damag- 
ing of them. As Professor Norton is an eminent authority 
amongst literary men, both in this country and in America, 
we think it well to recall one or two of his strictures on 
Froude' s biographical methods in addition to those referred 
to in the text. 

169 



APPENDIX 

With reference to Froude's " Life of Carlyle," Professor 
Norton writes : — 

"'Express biography of me I had really rather that there 
should be none,' said Carlyle in his Will, and a biography of 
him, correct at least if meagre, might perhaps have been 
gathered from his letters, his Reminiscences and the Memo- 
nals of Jane Welsh. Mr. Froude, however, thought other- 
wise, and has given to the public an * express biography of 
him.' The view of Mr. Carlyle's character presented in this 
biography has not approved itself to many of those who knew 
Carlyle best. It may be a striking picture, but it is not a 
good portrait. 

"For the present, at least, it appears impracticable to 
prepare another formal biography. The peculiar style of 
Mr. Froude's performance, already in possession of the field, 
might perhaps put a portrait of Carlyle drawn by a hand 
more faithful to nature, and less skilled in fine artifices than 
his own, at a temporary disadvantage with the bulk of readers. 
But it has seemed right to print some of Carlyle's letters in 
such wise that with his Reminiscences they might serve as a 
partial autobiography, and illustrate his character by unques- 
tionable evidence. They do not indeed afford a complete 
portrait ; but so far as they go the line will be correct." 

With regard to the love letters, Professor Norton writes : — 

" As to what use I might be justified in making of another 
series of letters at my disposal, those from Carlyle to Miss 
Welsh from their first acquaintance in 1821 until their mar- 
riage in 1826, I have felt grave doubts. The letters of lovers 
are sacred confidences, whose sanctity none ought to violate. 
Mr. Froude's use of these letters seems to me, on general 
grounds, unjustifiable, and the motives he alleges for it 
inadequate. But Carlyle himself had strictly forbidden their 
printing. When he was editing the Letters and Memorials 
of Jane Welsh Carlyle, of her letters to him, and of his to 
her, which were written before their marriage, only one 

170 



APPENDIX 

short note from Miss Welsh, dated 3rd September, 1825, 
printed by Mr. Froude {^Life, I., 308, 309), could be found; 
the rest were missing. To the copy of this short note 
Carlyle appends the words : ' In pencil all but the address. 
Original strangely saved ; and found accidentally in one of 
the presses to-day. Her note, when put down by the coach, 
on that visit to us at Hoddam Hill in September, 1825! 
How mournful now, how beautiful and strange ! A relic to 
me priceless (T. C, 12th March, 1868).' As to the then 
missing Letters written before their marriage, his and Miss 
Welsh's, Carlyle, in the original manuscript from which the 
copy given to Mr. Froude was made, says : ' My strict com- 
mand now is, " burn them, if ever found. Let no third party 
read them; let rvo printing of them, or of any part of them, 
be ever thought of by those who love me ! " ' 

" I decided not to open the parcels containing these letters. 
But I was gradually led by many facts to the conviction that 
Mr. Froude had distorted their significance, and had given a 
view of the relations between Carlyle and his future wife, in 
essential respects incorrect and injurious to their memory. 
I therefore felt obliged to read these letters, which I have 
done with extreme reluctance, and with reverential respect 
for the sacredness of their contents. The conviction which 
determined me to read them was confirmed by the perusal. 
The question then arose whether further publication of them 
was justifiable for the sake of correcting the view presented 
by Mr. Froude. The answer seemed plain, that only such 
of these letters, or such portions of them, as had not any 
specifically private character, could rightly be printed. I 
have, therefore, printed comparatively few of Carlyle's letters 
to Miss Welsh, while, in an Appendix to Volume II., I have 
tried to set right some of the facts misrepresented by Mr. 
Froude, and to show his method of dealing with his materials." 

"The nineteenth chapter of the first volume of Mr. 
Froude's Life is in great part occupied with an account of 
various projects considered by Carlyle and Miss Welsh, after 

171 



APPENDIX 

their engagement, in regard to a place of residence and other 
necessary arrangements preliminary to marriage. Mr. 
Froude paints Carlyle as throughout selfish and inconsiderate 
of the interests of Miss Welsh and her Mother. But the 
letters which he prints complete or in part, as well as those 
which he does not print, do not seem to support this view. 
'However deeply,' he says, 'she honoured her chosen hus- 
band, she could not hide from herself that he was selfish — 
extremely selfish' (page 337). This charge Miss Welsh 
may be allowed to deny for herself. ' I think you nothing 
but what is noble and wise.' 'At the bottom of my heart, 
far from censuring, I approve of your whole conduct ' (4th 
March, 1826). 'It is now five years since we first met — five 
blessed years ! During that period my opinion of you has 
never wavered, but gone on deliberately rising to a higher 
and higher degree of regard' (28th June, 1826). 

" The apparent disposition to represent in an unpleasant 
light the character and conduct of Carlyle, as well as of Miss 
Welsh and her Mother, which marks Mr. Fronde's narrative, 
is displayed in many minor disparaging statements, so made 
as to avoid arousing suspicion of their having little or no 
foundation, and arranged so as [to contribute artfully to the 
general effect of depreciation. A single instance will suffice 
for illustration. On page 337 Mr. Froude says: 'For her 
daughter's sake she [Mrs. Welsh] was willing to make an 
effort to like him, and, since the marriage was to be either 
to live with him or to accept him as her son-in-law in her own 
house and in her own circle. . . . Mrs. Welsh had a large ac- 
quaintance. He liked none of them, and " her visitors would 
neither be diminished in numbers, nor bettered in quality." 
No ! he must have the small house in Edinburgh ; and " the 
moment he was master of a house the first use he would turn 
it to would be to slam the door against nauseous intruders." ' 
The fact is that no such plan as would appear from Mr. 
Froude's statement was in question. The plan was, as Miss 
Welsh sets it forth in a letter of ist February, 1826, that 
Carlyle was to hire a little house in Edinburgh, 'and next 

172 



APPENDIX 

November we are to — hire one within some dozen yards of 
it, so that we may all live together like one family until such 
time as we are married, and after. I had infinite trouble in 
bringing my mother to give ear to this magnificent project. 
She was clear for giving up fortune, house-gear, everything 
to you and I [sic] and going to live with my poor old grand- 
father at Templand. . . . But how do you relish my plan ? 
Should you not like to have such agreeable neighbours ? We 
would walk together every day, and you would come and 
take tea with us at night. To me it seems as if the King- 
dom of Heaven were at hand.' To this Carlyle replied, 9th 
February : * What a bright project you have formed ! Ma- 
tured in a single night, like Jack's Bean in the Nursery Tale, 
and with houses in it too! Ah, Jane, Jane, I fear it will 
never answer half so well in practice as [it] does on paper. 
It is impossible for two households to live as if they were one ; 
doubly impossible (if there were degrees of impossibility) in 
the present circumstances. I shall never get any enjoyment 
of your company till you are all my own. How often have 
y©u seen me with pleasure in the presence of others ? How 
often with positive dissatisfaction? For your own sake I 
should rejoice to learn that you were settled in Edinburgh; 
a scene much fitter for you than your present one : but I 
had rather that it were with me than with any other. Are 
you sure that the number of parties and formal visitors 
would be diminished in number or bettered in quality, accord- 
ing to the present scheme ? ' [This refers to Miss Welsh's 
frequent complaint on this score. In one of her last letters, 
8th December, 1825, she had spoken of recent visitors at 
Haddington, and declared, 'This has been a more terrible 
infliction than anything that befell our friend Job.' Carlyle 
goes on] ' My very heart also sickens at these things : the 
moment I am master of a house the first use I turn it to will 
be to slam the door of it on the face of nauseous intrusions 
[not 'intruders,' as Mr. Froude prints], of all sorts which it 
can exclude.' 

"On page 342 Mr. Froude says: 'When it had been pro- 

173 



APPENDIX 

posed that he should live with Mrs, Welsh at Haddington, 
he would by consenting have spared the separation of a 
mother from an only child, and would not perhaps have hurt 
his own intellect by an effort of self-denial,' 

" No proposal to live with Mrs. Welsh at Haddington was 
ever made. In a letter of i6th March, 1826, a part of 
which, including the following sentences, is printed by 
Mr. Froude himself (page 343), Miss Welsh says: 'My 
mother, like myself, has ceased to feel any contentment in 
this pitiful [not 'hateful' as printed] Haddington, and is 
bent on disposing of our house here as soon as may be, 
and hiring one elsewhere. Why should it not be in the 
vicinity of Edinburgh after all? and why should not you 
live with your wife in her [not 'your,' as printed] mother's 
house ? ' 

"There is no foundation whatever for the statements 
(page 336) that 'all difficulties might be got over , . , if the 
family could be kept together,' and that 'this arrangement 
occurred to every one who was interested in the Welshs' 
welfare as the most obviously desirable,' Mrs, Welsh's 
' consent to take Carlyle into the family . . , made Miss 
Welsh perfectly happy,' Mrs, Welsh's consent does not 
appear to have ever been asked, much less to have been 
given to any such arrangement. In a part of Miss Welsh's 
letter of i6th March, not quoted by Mr. Froude, she says: 
'I will propose the thmg to my mother,' that is, the project 
that they should all live together, in case Carlyle should 
approve it. He wisely did not approve it, Mr, Froude's 
account of the whole matter is a tissue of confusion and mis- 
representation, 

" One more example of Mr. Froude's method, and I have 
done. The following passage is from page 358, it refers to 
arrangements for the journey to Edinburgh after the wed- 
ding, ' Carlyle, thrifty always, considered it might be expe- 
dient to "take seats in the coach from Dumfries," The 
coach would be safer than a carriage, more certain of arriv- 
ing, etc. So nervous was he, too, that he wished his brother 

174 



APPENDIX 

John to accompany them on their journey — at least part of 
the way.' 

" What foundation this insinuation of mean and tasteless 
thrift on Carlyle's part, and of silly nervousness, possesses, 
may be seen from the following extracts from a letter of 
Carlyle's of 19th September. 'One other most humble care 
is whether we can calculate on getting post horses and 
chaises all the way to Edinburgh without danger of let, or 
[if] it would not be better to take seats in the coach for 
some part of it ? In this matter I suppose you can give me 
no light ; perhaps your mother might. At all events tell me 
your taste in the business, for the coach is sure, if the other 
is not. . . . John and I will come to Glendinning's Inn the 
night before ; he may ride with us the first stage if you like ; 
then come back with the chaise, and return home on the 
back of Larry, richer by one sister (in relations) than he 
ever was. Poor Jack ! ' 

" Such is the treatment that the most sacred parts of the 
lives of Carlyle and his wife receive at the hands of his 
trusted biographer ! There is no need, I believe, to speak 
of it in the terms it deserves. 

" The lives of Carlyle and his wife are not represented as 
they were in this book of Mr. Froude's. There was much 
that was sorrowful in their experience ; much that was sad 
in their relations to each other. Their mutual love did not 
make them happy, did not supply them with the self-control 
required for happiness. Their faults often prevailed against 
their love, and yet ' with a thousand faults they were both,' 
as Carlyle said to Miss Welsh (25th May, 1823), 'true-hearted 
people.' And through all the dark vicissitudes of life love 
did not desert them. Blame each of them as one may for 
carelessness, hardness, bitterness, in the course of the years, 
one reads their lives wholly wrong unless he read in them 
that the love that had united them was beyond the power of 
fate and fault to ruin utterly, that more permanent than 
aught else it abided in the heart of each, and that in what 
they were to each other it remained the unalterable element." 

175 



APPENDIX 

III. 

Mrs. Oliphant on Mrs. Carlyle and Froude. 

Mrs. Oliphant was united by ties of the closest friendship 
to Mrs. Carlyle in her later years, and had special qualifica- 
tions for understanding her highly complex, sensitive, and 
mobile nature. Herself characteristically Scotch, and with 
an intimate knowledge of her countrywomen, she could enter 
with sympathetic insight into those feelings and habits of 
thought of her friend, having their origin in inheritance and 
early nurture, which to the Southerner must often have 
remained obscure and unintelligible. Practised in the analy- 
sis of that puzzling and subtle compound — the female heart 
— her Miss Majoribanks, her Phoebe Beecham, and her Julia 
Herbert, show to what mastery in its chemistry she had 
attained — she was able to distinguish with delicate precision 
the true metal in Mrs. Carlyle's nature from the alloys fused 
into it by sickness and chagrin. An expert in biography — 
her " Life of Edward Irving " is an admirable performance 
— she knew how far in this species of literature revelations 
could properly go, and how necessary to it, is not only enthu- 
siasm, but sober judgment, a sense of proportion and fidelity 
to truth. She was, therefore, singularly well entitled to 
judge of Froude' s representation of her friend, and we should 
like to be able to reproduce the whole of her withering 
denunciation of him and his methods contained in an article 
which appeared in the " Contemporary Review " for May, 
1883, and which was allowed to pass unanswered, although it 
was as unsparing in its criticism as the Introduction and 
Notes to the " New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh 
Carlyle," which are said to have provoked the publication of 
" My Relations with Carlyle." We must, however, content 
ourselves with one or two extracts bearing in an illuminative 
way on points which have been dealt with in the text. 

With regard to " The Letters and Memorials," as issued 
by Froude, Mrs. Oliphant says : — 

176 



APPENDIX 

" Mrs. Carlyle, the writer of the letters now given to the 
world in three large volumes, following in the wake of four 
other large volumes — all given to the elucidation of a portion 
of the life of a great writer, to whom very few things ever 
happened — has had a cruel fate since the death of her hus- 
band deprived her of her last bulwark against that Nemesis 
known amongst men by the name of Froude. Her fate is 
all the harder that she really has done nothing to deserve it. 
She narrated freely all the events of her life as they occurred, 
according to the humour of the moment, and the gift that 
was in her : which was a very rare and fine gift, but one that 
naturally led to an instinctive seizing of all possible dramatic 
effects, and much humorous heightening of colour and deep- 
ening of interest. Her power of story-telling was extraordi- 
nary, as well as the whimsical humour that took hold of 
every ludicrous incident, and made out of a walk in the 
streets a whole amusing Odyssey of adventure ; and it was 
one of the chief amusements of her house and her friends. 
What she thus did in speech she did also in her letters, with 
a vivacity and humour which lend something interesting 
even to the hundredth headache, domestic squabble, or house- 
cleaning recorded. But all this was for her friends; there is 
not the slightest evidence that she, at least, even intended 
these narratives for the world. She was the proudest 
woman — as proud and tenacious of her dignity as a savage 
chief. And of all things in the world, to be placed on a 
pedestal before men as a domestic martyr, an unhappy wife, 
the victim of a harsh husband, is the last which she would 
have tolerated. As a matter of fact, her whole existence has 
been violated, every scrap of decent drapery torn from her, 
and herself exhibited as perhaps never modest and proud 
matron was before to the comments of the world. Carlyle 
himself rushed upon his fate by his will and choice, by foolish 
belief in the flattering suggestion that everything that con- 
cerned him must be interesting to the world, and by a mis- 
placed and too boundless trust in the friends of his later life. 
But Mrs. Carlyle did nothing to lay herself open to this fate. 

12 177 



APPENDIX 

She did not confide her reputation to Mr. Froude, or give 
him leave to unveil her inmost life according to his own 
interpretation of it : and it is thus doubly hard upon her that 
she should have been made to play the part of heroine in the 
tragedy, which his pictorial and artistic instincts have made 
out of his master's life. 

" It would be [in vain to attempt to set this injured and 
outraged woman right with the world in respect of the 
earlier portion of her life, to which the biographer of her 
husband has given the turn that pleased him, under the 
almost, if not altogether, unanimous protest of all who knew 
her, but quite to the satisfaction of the crowd who did not, 
and to whom, indeed, such a fine conventional example of 
the hard fate of the wife of a man of genius was, perhaps, 
never afforded before. We may, perhaps, be permitted, 
however, to say, though with little hope of convincing any 
reader unacquainted with the class to which Mrs. Carlyle 
belonged, or either traditionally or personally with the Scot- 
land of her time, that the assumption upon which Mr. 
Froude goes, of her immeasurable social superiority, and the 
tremendous descent she made in becoming the housekeeper 
and almost the domestic servant of her husband, is a mistake 
and misconception of the most fundamental kind. It has 
indeed the justification of Carlyle's own magniloquent 
description: — 'From birth upwards she had lived in opu- 
lence ' repeated in these volumes ; but then Carlyle described 
his little house in Chelsea as made into a sort of palace by 
her exertions, which Mr. Froude and all her friends are 
aware was a good deal more than the fact. The 'opulence ' 
of the country doctor's daughter was something of the same 
kind. Modest comfort, even luxury in a sober way, the 
highest estimation, and all the petting and pleasures that an 
only beloved child could be surrounded with, she no doubt 
had. But life in Haddington in the first quarter of this 
century was not like life in South Kensington in the present 
day. The woman's share of the world's work was very dis- 
tinct, and was despised by no one. There is no evidence 

178 



APPENDIX 

that Dr. Welsh was ever rich — so far, indeed, is the evidence 
against this, that his daughter had to make over the Httle 
property of Craigenputtock, in order to secure her mother's 
independence, leaving herself penniless. But even had she 
been left with a dot, proportioned to her position, and had 
she married one of her father's assistants, or a neighbouring 
minister — her natural fate — there is no reason to suppose 
that she would have been much more elevated above the 
cares of common life than she was as the wife of Thomas 
Carlyle. . . . The present writer, though of a later genera- 
tion than Mrs. Carlyle, was trained to believe that a woman 
should be able to 'turn her hand ' to any domestic duty that 
might be necessary. And the pathetic picture of an elegant 
young lady descending from her elevated sphere to make the 
bread, and even to mend the trousers of her husband, which 
has touched the sympathetic public to such indignation, is 
ludicrous to those to whom the fact of both positions is 
known." 

With reference to the conjugal relations of the Carlyles, 
Mrs. Oliphant writes : — 

" We confess for our own part that the manner of mind 
which can deduce from this long autobiography an idea inju- 
rious to the perfect union of these two kindred souls, is to 
us incomprehensible. They tormented each other, but not 
half as much as each tormented him and herself ; they were 
too like each other, suffering in the same way from nerves 
disordered and digestion impaired, and excessive self-con- 
sciousness, and the absence of all other objects in their life. 
They were, in the fullest sense of the word, everything to 
each other — for good and evil, sole comforters, chief tor- 
menters. 'Ill to hae but waur to want,' says the proverb, 
which must have been framed in view of some such exagger- 
ated pair ; perhaps, since the proverb is Scotch, the condi- 
tions of mind may be a national one. Sometimes Carlyle 
was 'ill to have,' but it is abundantly evident that he was 
'waur to want,' — i.e., to be without — to his wife. To him, 
though he wounded her in a hundred small matters, there is 

179 



APPENDIX 

no evidence that she was ever anything else than the most 
desirable of women, understood and acknowledged as the 
setter-right of all things, the providence and first authority 
of life. 

" If these two remarkable people had been, like others, 
allowed without any theory to tell their own story, and 
express their own sentiments, what we should now do would 
be to give our readers a glimpse, tranquilly, of the domestic 
economy of that little house, of which its mistress was justly 
proud, as a triumph of her own exertions, and its master 
somewhat grandiloquent upon, as something in itself more 
beautiful and remarkable than any house in Cheyne Row 
could ever be. We would tell them of her tea-parties, her 
evening visitors, of the little Peasweep of a maid who insisted 
on bringing up four teacups every evening, while Mrs. Carlyle 
and her mother were alone in the house, with a conviction, 
never disappointed, that 'the gentlemen' would drop in to 
use them ; of how she bought her sofa, and adapted an old 
mattress to it, and made a cover for it, and so procured this 
comfort, at the small cost of one pound, out of her own 
private pocket ; of how the cocks and hens next door, and 
the dog that would bark, and even the piano on the other 
side of the party-wall, were ' written down ' by appeals to the 
magnanimity of the owners, on behalf of the unfortunate 
man of genius who could not get his books written, or even 
by bribes cleverly administered when persuasion and reason 
both failed. The pages teem with domestic incidents in 
every kind of ornamental setting, all told with such an unfail- 
ing life and grace, that, had the facts themselves been of the 
first importance, they could not have charmed us more ; and 
we do not grudge the three big volumes so filled, in which 
there is not from beginning to end an event more important 
than new painting and papering, new maid-servants, an ill- 
ness or an expedition. But as circumstances stand, the 
reader is not sufficiently easy in his mind to be content with 
these, but has been so fretted and troubled by Mr. Froude 
and his theories, and the determination which moulds all that 

1 80 



APPENDIX 

gentleman's thoughts to make out that Carlyle was a sort of 
ploughman-despot, and his wife an unwilling and resentful 
slave, that we must proceed first to find foundations for the 
house, of which we know more in all its details than perhaps 
of any house that has been built and furnished in this cen- 
tury. Was it founded on the rock of love and true union, 
or was it a mere four walls, no home at all, in which the 
rude master made his thrall labour for him, and crushed her 
delicate nature in return ? " 

Mrs. Oliphant supplies the answer to that question out of 
Mrs. Carlyle's own mouth, and shows from her letters how 
cruelly and egregiously Froude has erred in dealing with her 
relations with her husband. Touching on the submission of 
Mrs. Carlyle's private Journal to Miss Jewsbury by Froude, 
for the elucidation of its dark passages, Mrs. Oliphant says : — 

" So Geraldine, in a piece of fine writing — words as untrue 
as ever words were, as every unprejudiced reader of this 
book will see for himself, and entirely contrary to that kind 
soul's ordinary testimony. Not a critic, so far as we are 
aware, has ever suggested that this proceeding was unjusti- 
fiable or outside of the limits of honour. Is it then permis- 
sible to outrage the memory of a wife, and betray her secrets 
because one has received as a gift her husband's papers ? 
She gave no permission, left no authority for such a proceed- 
ing. Does the disability of women go as far as this ? or is 
there no need for honour in respect to the dead ? ' There 
ought to be mystery about Carlyle,' says Mr. Froude. No, 
poor, foolish, fond old man ! there is no mystery about him 
henceforward, thanks to his own distracted babble of genius, 
first of all. But how about his wife ? Did she authorise 
Mr. Froude to unveil her most secret thoughts, her darkest 
hours of weakness, which even her husband passed reverently 
over .? No woman of this generation, or of any other we are 
acquainted with, has had such desperate occasion to be saved 
from her friends: and public feeling and sense of honour 
must be at a low ebb indeed when no one ventures to stand 
up and to stigmatize as it deserves this betrayal and exposure 

i8i 



APPENDIX 

of the secret of a woman's weakness, a secret which throws 
no light upon anything, which does not add to our knowledge 
either of her character or her husband's, and with which the 
public had nothing whatever to do ! " 

Would that Mrs. Oliphant were with us again — to write 
as she once did a whole number of Maga, and to stigmatize 
as they deserve the betrayals — far deeper than those which 
she has so vigorously condemned, which Froude, being dead, 
yet speaking, has perpetuated in "My Relations with 
Carlyle"! 



182 



NEW LETTERS OF JANE WELSH CARLYLE 

A Collection of hitherto Unpublished Letters, annotated by Thomas Carlyle, 
and edited by Alexander Carlyle. With an Introduction by Sir James 
Crichton Browne, F.R.S. With numerous illustrations in lithography by 
T. R. Way and photogravures and portraits from hitherto unreproduced 
originals. In two volumes, 8vo. Boxed. $6.00 net. 

Uniform with " New Letters of Thomas Carlyle." 

Some Critical Opinions: 

Mr. Percy Favor Bicknell in The Dial says :—" A fresh instalment 
of these piquant letters will be warmly welcomed by Mrs. Car- 
lyle's admirers. Mrs. Carlyle's vein is already familiar to the 
reading public, and she is as bright and entertaining here as in 
the earlier-published correspondence. Mrs. Carlyle's correspond- 
ence, as annotated by a husband's loving hand, is a most charm- 
ing and impressive work of literature. The present editor has 
done his work so wisely and so well. A service has been ren- 
dered to the cause of truth and a pious tribute paid to the memory 
of two suffering souls by the publication of these letters. The 
two volumes are of excellent workmanship, the clear type and 
finely executed portraits being a delight to the eye." 

Mr. James Whitcomb Rilsy says :—" A most valuable work, supply- 
ing as it does the real (though indirect) history and personality of 
a character as generally loved for her womanly graces as admired 
for her brilliant gifts of mind. Accept my congratulations upon 
your giving to the book-world such a treasure." 

The New York Commercial Advertiser :—" Cltvtr in the extreme, 
sparkling with wit and glowing with fine humor. They reveal at 
once the intellectual woman, sharpened and polished by intimate 
association with the best minds of England, and the tender, de- 
voted, sympathetic wife and helpmate. They have a delightful 
piquancy of flavor." 

The New York Times Saturday Review :—" Varied and entertaining, 
'The New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle ' will be 
widely read and discussed." 

The Washington Ji>«^j .•—" The work has been carefully done, and 
the book should be one of the features of the ' Carlyle revival ' 
which is predicted for the near future." 

The Chicago Record-Herald: — " These volumes bear new and charm- 
ing evidence of the brilliant intellectuality and sterling character 
of Jane Welsh Carlyle." 

The Cleveland Leader .-—"ThtSQ letters are extremely pleasant to 
read from their native charm." 

The Detroit Tribune :—" Mrs. Carlyle was an acute observer of the 
times and events in which she lived, and her letters are delight- 
fully chatty and entertaining." 



\y 



NOV 12 1903 



